Learning tmux

tmux in general

I learned GNU screen a couple months ago by reading the entire manual. I thought I would do the same with tmux. But as good as the tmux man page is (it’s very good), I’ve not found it to be a joyful read.

UPDATE: Yeah, it’s not that bad. I’ve read most of it now. It is really very well written. It’s just hard to get an overall sense of how to actually use TMUX from the man page. So you pretty much still need to use tmux and look stuff up as you go. Skimming the man page simply gives you a sense of what’s possible…​

Here’s what has been working:

I’m fighting the temptation to remap these keys! The one I want to do most is replacing the arrow keys for split pane selection with vi-like hjkl. But I really want to learn the defaults before I start making my own weird stuff. tmux is one of those tools I know I’ll be using on all sorts of machines that will not have my custom config.

UPDATE: So far, I’ve been using tmux off and on to good success. It’s an excellent tool. Sometimes a separate terminal (especially in a tiling window manager like dwm) is what I need. Sometimes it’s tmux.