Comments on: tmux, a BSD alternative to GNU Screen

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:57:30 +0000

Second the use of C-z for prefix key (C-z z is easy to type) and I also use C-q and C-s at times (flow control is practically useless these days).

Plus, if you’re using job control that much, you’re doing it wrong. That’s what screen/tmux is for!

By: Vedat

Vedat — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:26:09 +0000

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time trying to choose an unused and easily accessible escape key. My final choice is Ctrl-l. The only time I use it is when my screen is messed up, and I want to redraw it, but it doesn’t occur often enough, so pressing “ctrl-l l” is not a big problem for me.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:30:48 +0000

Vince: Like Ramkumar, I use C-z as my escape. I make heavy use of job control, but haven’t found that hitting ‘C-z z’ is particularly more inconvenient than a plain ‘C-z’. (Unlike C-a, which is flat-out awful if one is used to emacs-style navigation.)

By: Vincent Stemen

Vincent Stemen — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:55:07 +0000

Arghh! I specified ctrl with angle brackets and
it stripped them out as tags.
I meant C-p and C-n.

By: Vincent Stemen

Vincent Stemen — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:52:48 +0000

Nope. p and n are used extensively.
They go to the previous and next line in both emacs
and in normal mode in vi, they go forward and
backward in the history in emacs editing mode of the
shell, and, most importantly, they perform string
completion in insert mode (similar to in bash
and zsh) in vim for matching strings before or after
the current cursor position.

By: mark bill

mark bill — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:31:30 +0000

ctrl-P

easy to press and AFAIK unassigned anywhere.

By: Vince

Vince — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:30:59 +0000

C-z is a terrible choice. Apparently you never use Berkeley
job control. I use C-z *all the time* to suspend my current
process, do something else, and then “fg” to resume. The
problem is that most of the control keys are used by one
application or another. I have been using screen on BSD and
am about to try tmux. C-a has been a minor inconvenience,
because of it being the emacs beginning of line command,
although I am primarily a vim user. C-b is the emacs
command to move the cursor back one character and the vi
command to go scroll back a page. Although, there are
alternatives, such as the arrow keys for those functions, so
C-b probably would be less of an inconvenience for me than
C-a has been.

Perhaps an ALT key, such as M-s (s for screen controls),
M-a, or M-b would be a good choice.

By: Ramkumar Ramachandra

Ramkumar Ramachandra — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:13:35 +0000

tmux is fantastic! I’m an Emacs user, and I’ve found that C-z is the most comfortable and unobtrustive escape for me.

By: bllbb

bllbb — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:11:16 +0000

what i like with tmux is the speed. screen always been damn slow.
otherwise they’re really very similar. i just enabled screen-like bindings and i feel like i’m using screen really.. just faster.. and some things like title detection work better

By: Dan Chen

Dan Chen — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:31:55 +0000

tmux is in Debian Sid and Ubuntu Karmic, at least.