I gave up on it once I discovered https://zellij.dev/

Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting.

Guys, did you know about tmux control mode? It tells the host terminal to treat tmux tabs as actual tabs in the terminal. That means that things like scrollback, tab navigation, copy paste, keyboard shortcuts, etc are all handled natively, and you can visually see all your tmux tabs! It doesn't have great support across all terminals, but it does work great in iTerm 2.

Try `tmux -CC` in iTerm.

For a tmux novice like me, this was a total game changer :)

I had my tmux customized to the point I forgot how to use it on a clean install which is a problem when I'm sshing into a server.

I wish it had better defaults but now I run it as is. After a while you get used to it. The only thing I always have to change is the mouse scroll and my brain cannot retain the exact command.

I prefer to hide the status bar entirely, and use an fzf-powered named window switcher to navigate between windows.

https://github.com/cmpadden/dotfiles/blob/6e767691a6b1295260...

I left tmux for zellij after several unsuccessful attempts to get Shift+Enter working.

Was quite impressed initially and invested weeks in building new muscle memory, but somehow Zellij crashed with panic more than once, leaving all my processes orphaned. Decided to go back to tmux, and found a simple fix for my Shift+Enter issue.

In case anyone is looking for it, the fix is "bind-key -T root S-Enter send-keys C-j" borrowed from https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6072.

I like to have an IBM 3270 style status bar on the bottom.

    set-option -gq status-style "fg=brightblue,overline"

I've been thoroughly impressed with tmux control mode[0] in iTerm2. This lets you manage remote terminal windows with your local window management provider. It is currently in the process of being implemented in ghostty[1] as well, can't wait!

[0] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/1935#issuecomm...

Could never get mouse copy to work well (using mac at moment). When I make text selection, selects yellow and upon release goes to terminal prompt. I had one config work at one point and it kept selecting from all panes, not just one the one I'm in. Any ideas?

I highly recommend just turning the mouse on, it's amazing for resizing panels and the rightclick menu is nice.

  set -g mouse on

  setw -g aggressive-resize on

If you're interested in an out of the box multiplexer. https://zellij.dev/ is great. I've been using it for about a year now and loving it.

I read "tmux 2: mouse-free productivity" in a weekend years ago and it may be, pound-for-pound, one of the more impactful books on my productivity.

Seems like they are keeping up-to-date too: https://bookshop.org/p/books/tmux-3-productive-mouse-free-de...

There’s a lot of ways tmux could be used, but when it is part of IDE the most important usability tweaks that make tmux rock for me personally are:

— session configuration save/recall (with pane layout for each tab and directory for each pane[0]),

— nvim integration (for seamless split navigation and so that I can create or reattach to a tmux session in an nvim float, even though that nvim usually runs inside tmux),

— a bind to force-reload a pane if (when!) a command hangs.

For switching between tabs, I find that the most ideal bind is simply Cmd + pane number. There’s never more than 10 panes that I’d often want to switch to within a single session.

[0] I always forget what terminology a given multiplexer uses, so let’s just call them “panes” and “tabs”.

I would also describe haventerminal.com as making tmux pretty and usable! but without any setup steps, first class support for agents, and management of multiple machines. Disclaimer: It's a macOS app we just launched and it ships its own open source session persistence.

I like having a red bar for tmux running as root and a blue one for running it as a normal user, e.g. for root:

    set -g status-style "bg=red"

    set -g status-justify absolute-centre
    set -g status-position top

Hard agree on intuitive splits, I do this as well.

My hotkey is the backtick, `, rather than a chord.

The one thing I still struggle with - because it happens rarely - is easily copying the contents, full or partial, of a particular pane.

I use c-q for prefix key because it doesn’t conflict with common zsh and vim bindings.

Because the author suggested swapping caps lock and control key, I also recommend mapping escape key at the control key and change the behavior based on whether another key is pressed. For example, if you press control + a, it sends c-a, but if you only press control key and then release, it sends escape. It makes your vim life (and in general) a lot easier. You don’t have to compete the most variable real estate on the keyboard, right next to the A key.

For most bindings like moving, resizing, and splitting,I emulate vim bindings.

Also, -r flag for bind-key command is impotent, because it enables to repeat commands like changing the pane size or move focus. You don’t have to press prefix key each time.

If you want to get fancy look with minimal setting, use plugins like nord tmux theme.

My two favorite tmux QoL improvements are enabling seamless navigation between neovim and tmux (there are many plugins but i use this one https://github.com/aserowy/tmux.nvim) and extrakto which lets you fuzzy select anything in the tmux buffer and insert into the cursor or copy it to the clipboard. (https://github.com/laktak/extrakto)

One way to make tmux way more usable is to use tmux-fingers, which provides hint-based mouse-free copypaste capabilities

https://github.com/morantron/tmux-fingers

(disclaimer: I'm the developer of the plugin)

I prefer to use tmux non-interactively. For example, I use it for running daemons in the foreground, (textmode) screen scraping and scripting text-only browser

I do almost all interactive work while detached from tmux (personal preference)

I also rely on tmux buffers for a textmode "clipboard". I do not use x11

I've been using tmux since 2011 well before it became popular. I only use a fraction of its features

I actually asked chatgpt to recommend me a great starter tmux conf, and it gave me 80% of this blog post. Not an insult btw.

my favorite thing to do with tmux is using a sessionizer script[0] (credit for the idea/original implementation goes to ThePrimeagen). allows for fzf-ing my projects and creating a separate session for each one. especially handy for bouncing around when working on features/fixes that span multiple repos

for (neo)vim users, flattening vim splits and tmux panes into the same level for switching with ctrl+hjkl is handy too

[0](https://github.com/tolly-xyz/dotfiles/blob/main/.local%2Fbin...)

I appreciate that tmux has theoretical advantages over screen, but man does the implementation suck. On Mac it still seems like there's no way to copy text if you have mouse mode on (at least in code-server).

Worth mentioning my tmux llm chat helper sidechat: https://github.com/day50-dev/sidechat

I've been told more than once it's life-changing. I certainly use it every day.

I would love to have a way to switch sessions easily, like with panes where I just click or have more shortcuts available

Any guides for tmux configuration that works well with Emacs? The use of Ctrl and Meta for basic operations conflicts with a lot of Emacs commands.

I've always written my code in vim and preferred CLIs in general, but I really want a GUI for the terminal itself, including tmux. iTerm2 makes it nice for example, even if it's only to use the meta/super key instead of the heavily overloaded control.

The only reason I don't use tmux is because of how annoying it is to look at scrollback. Am I using it wrong?

I almost never bother theming things on my computer; I usually don't really care about how things look and I can't be bothered with it.

I have two exceptions to this: NeoVim and tmux.

tmux in particular looks very ugly out of the box; I'm not sure why they decided to have a bright green bar on the bottom (presumably to be high-contrast in a low color terminal), but I really hate staring at it all day (since I kind of live in tmux most of the day on both my work and personal computer). I have it set as close as I can to the Wombat color scheme that's built into emacs (and which can be easily added to Vim), because I personally have always felt that that was the most pleasant theme to stare at for long periods of time.

Another thing I do is set the prefix key to backtick. I have no idea why I started doing this, but at this point I'm too geriatric to change, and I still greatly prefer this over ctrl-b. The only issue I've had is when I need to do code blocks in markdown, but I've just gotten used to hitting backtick twice when I need to actually use a backtick.

I stopped using tmux when I started using kitty terminal with native split windows. I prefer the native window management of kitty, but I do miss the session saving of tmux (e.g. if I accidentally close a tab).

feels wrong to scp a dotfile to a server you only touch once

I love tmux but one thing which really annoys me is the fact that I cannot use the mouse wheel or the scroll back to see the previous content. I know there are shortcuts to go forward and back but I always forget them and they are not easily accessible on my keyboard and cumbersome.

Just use smux.dev

the most tmux thing in the world is that "make tmux usable" is still a genre.

I've had the ctrl-a setup ever since migrating from screen to tmux, just due to muscle memory. But it is more conveniently located than ctrl-b - it's also rather nice if I have multiple nested layers of tmux due to temporary ones on other hosts. Sure you can just keep repeating the bind, but, just remembering that the second layer uses ctrl-b is a bit more convenient I feel. Slows me down a little, but usually I'm not using the 2nd layer as much.

I don't use capslock for ctrl though. It's much too useful as the Compose key ;)

i used to use tmux a lot when i used to develop on arch, since i moved to macos i never installed it.

tbh i even forgot what it used to buy me.

I've used ` as prefix for years now. Considering how often you switch windows/panes, I reckon using a single character has saved me hours per year. :D

It rarely conflicts with whatever I'm doing, but I have a binding to temporarily switch it to `C-a` and back, which I almost never use.

Oh, and I've used this themepack[1] for years as well.

Actually, here's my config[2] if someone finds it useful. I can't claim ownership of it, and probably stole it from somewhere I don't remember anymore.

BTW, the author's site https://rootloops.sh/ is certainly... something. :)

[1]: https://github.com/jimeh/tmux-themepack

[2]: https://gist.github.com/imiric/9bd3e5b7fc5e1468d05abc674f42e...

I ended up AI-slopcoding myself a small shell script for the few things I need from tmix: https://gist.github.com/dmitriid/523a5229c9a17a1cf4ad9182f4c...

I just couldn't be bothered to remember all the prefixed commands :)

nice update on tmux

that's pretty nice, but did you try cmux.com