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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Can you please ELI5 tmux? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am fairly familiar with Linux, I've been using different distros for some years now and have done some config editing here and there. I am also a web developer and use the terminal quite a lot and so I always stumble on people's recommendation to use tmux and how good it is, but I never really understood what it does and, in layman's terms, how can it be useful and for what use cases.

Can you guys please enlight me a bit on this?

Thank you.

Edit: if my phrasing is a bit awkward or confusing I apologize since I am not an English native speaker. (Maybe that's why I never fully grasped what tmux is from other explanations xD)

Edite: Ok, just to clarify, my original struggle was to understand what made tmux different from using some terminal app and just split the screen xD

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

I guess the best analogy is a "virtual desktop" but for the terminal.
It's is a program which runs in a terminal and allows multiple other terminal programs to be run inside it.

Each program inside tmux gets its own "page" or "screen" and you can jump between them (next-screen, previous-screen etc).
So instead of having multiple terminal windows, you only have one and switch the screen/page inside it.

You can detech from the program and leave it running - so next time you log on to the server, you can re-attach to it and all your screens/sessions are still there.

Not super useful on your local machine - but when you have to connect to a remote server (or several) is really shines. Especially if you have to go through a jumphost. You can just connect to your jumphost, start tmux, then create a "screen" for each server you need to connect to - do your stuff and deattach. Next time, just re-attach and all your stuff is there.

Did that help?

[–] adj 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I actually get a lot of use out of it locally. I usually have multiple sessions for different concerns and prefix + s lets me switch between them quickly using vi keybindings. I can even do prefix + w to switch to a specific window in a different session.

I don't use vscode much lately, but when I did it was also useful sometimes to have the same window in my terminal client on one desktop and in vscode's terminal on another when switching back and forth a lot to see a browser or database client or whatever. Just having the freedom to move the session around to different applications is nice.

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