Tag Archives: screen

tmux — a super quick “getting started” “cheat sheet” for screen users

Google didn’t find this for me. Google FAIL, Internet FAIL. No computer biscuit for you!

If you’re a pretty fundamental screen user then this is about all you’ll need to start out with tmux:

Goal screen tmux
Start named session: screen -S mysessionname tmux new-session -s mysessionname
Attach-to (and detach) named session: screen -rd mysessionname tmux attach-session -dt mysessionname
Detach from session from within: ^A then d ^B then d

Why use tmux over screen — I have no idea yet! At the very least the default scrollback behaviour seems to be more user-friendly. On that note while you can shift-PgUp/PgDown well enough as in a normal terminal it keeps resetting to the bottom. I’m not sure if this behaviour can be disabled but I found that ^B-then-PageUp takes you into a useful scrollback-view-mode that you can get out of by simply pressing q.

Scrollback aside, I’ve only just started to try to use it, thus this post… nothing against tmux so far!

It’s newer, shinier, and supposedly more eXtensible than screen. Yippee?

Those tmux command lines are just crying out for some shell aliases.

More: Google for it, this is just “baby-steps” bootstrapping information here… there’s plenty of advanced information out there. Want vi-like scrollback navigation?

(The first few Google results I checked didn’t actually provide the useful details with respect to working with named sessions.)

There, super-rare tech entry from me. It’s been years. That’s what a head-cold, no alcohol, and 1.5 litres of coffee does to you… productivity!