1y ago

Can you please ELI5 tmux?

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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64 comments

You’ve gotten a lot of good replies, so I’ll give you an example:
My wife and I set up a Minecraft server on an old work computer of hers. We would SSH in, start the server, and play. However, if the host lost the SSH session, the entire server would crash because the session would close.
With tmux, we could attach, start the server, and unattach. I could start the server and later my wife could attach to close it. I could SSH on my phone via iSH, attach, start the server, unattach, and close the app. We could troubleshoot mods together, since we could both see everything that happened in the session on our screens.
It offered a level of flexibility a traditional SSH session doesn’t give.
- Sounds like "screen"? (I never heard about tmux until today, I work a lot with Linux on a daily base, maintaining servers etc. I use screen a lot.)
  
  Tmux is screen in more powerful. Zellij is another great terminal multiplexer. Worth giving all of them a whirl.
  
  Hadn't heard about Zellij before now, it looks really cool!

64 comments