So, one use case would be saving your current terminal setup. Instead of exiting the terminal and navigating to the project and setting up the environment again next time, you can simply detach and re-attach.
It’s a “terminal multiplexer”, i.e. you can start multiple terminals in a single terminal.
You might ask, why not open a new terminal window or tab? Well, you can only do that in a desktop environment and that’s not always available. Even if you can, you might want the terminals to be side by side in a single screen, which might not be easy to do with window tiling.
The real power of tmux, though, is that it manages the session you created. To quote from the manual:
tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached.
So, one use case would be saving your current terminal setup. Instead of exiting the terminal and navigating to the project and setting up the environment again next time, you can simply detach and re-attach.
When connecting to a remote server, this is especially useful:
Each session is persistent and will survive accidental disconnection (such as ssh(1) connection timeout) or intentional detaching
Suppose you want to execute a long running command on a remote server. If you just put it to foreground, when you exit the ssh session, the job is also killed. If you put it to the background, its output can’t be easily observed.
With tmux, you can simply run it in the foreground like normal and detach. When you reattach later, the job is running and you get all the output easily, as if you have been in that session all along.
The real power of tmux, though, is that it manages the session you created.
So, one use case would be saving your current terminal setup. Instead of exiting the terminal and navigating to the project and setting up the environment again next time, you can simply detach and re-attach.
In the company I work, we have to use jumpbox + “password” from proprietary code generator.
Imagine going through this, then you suddenly need 2nd terminal. Inconvenience doing it again in another terminal?
Well, there is a solution:
tmux
CTRL+B then ". And now you have 2 terminals.
Also tmux is great for “quick solution” kind of things - to leave something running in the background. Talking about background - you can have many terminals open, from only 1 SSH session. :)
Just to add, if you wanted to start VPN on boot automatically, you can create a systemd service file to take care of that and put it in ~/.config/systemd/user/
tmux (and GNU screen, its older predecessor) is a terminal multiplexer, which is a fancy phrase used to describe turning one terminal window into multiple terminal windows. It basically turns a single terminal window into a text-based tiling window manager that lets you run different shells concurrently in a single terminal, easily copy text between them, and have other quality of life improvements over using a single raw terminal.
Imagine you’re SSH’d into a remote machine. Unless you SSH again from a different terminal at the same time, you’re basically limited to a single terminal, and whatever you’re doing is interrupted if your connection drops. tmux runs on the remote machine, which means that if your connection is interrupted, tmux will continue running exactly as you left it, and you’ll be able to reattach to it using tmux attach.
Or, imagine your video drivers break and you’re forced to troubleshoot in a raw TTY. tmux will let you have a manpage and a shell open at the same time, or three different directories opened side by side. That’s a slightly more convoluted use case, but the point is that terminal multiplexers make it far more convenient to use the terminal in basically any situation that’s not just running a single short command and leaving.
Have you ever seen someone use a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment? Where it keeps all the currently running apps on screen in evenly sized tiles so you can see everything at once, nothing is in the “background?”
Tmux is a bit like that, but only for the terminal. It allows you to open multiple terminals in one “screen” or terminal emulator window, and switch between them with keyboard shortcuts. So if you want to look at your source code, test run your source code, and watch htop to see how it performs, you can do that with Tmux. It’s a bit less cumbersome than opening three terminal windows.
It also works over SSH, so you can SSH into a server or something, start tmux, then easily run several tools simultaneously.
Tmux sessions are also persistent. Imagine if you were in the middle of working on something on your desktop at the office, then it’s time to go home. You can detach your session, SSH into the box from your laptop, reattach that session and keep working right where you left off.
If you work in the terminal a lot, it’s a handy tool.
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