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tmux

tmux is a tool to manage terminal sessions. For those familiar with screen, tmux is a more featureful and better maintained alternative.

The primary functionality discussed here is tmux's ability to detach and re-attach sessions, without affecting the programs running within the session. When using unstable network connections (such as bad wifi), this can save you significant frustration. If the VPN or SSH connection drops, you can just reconnect and reattach the tmux session without losing any of your work.

tmux has many other useful features, including displaying multiple terminals at once by splitting the window into panes. In addition to the man page (man tmux), the The Tao of Tmux (especially chapters 7 and 11) is a popular reference. The Linux Academy also offers a convenient tmux cheat sheet, to help with frequently used tmux commands and keybindings.

Example

As a practical example, let's run tmux on medusa:

aqw@medusa:~$ tmux

And to celebrate creating our first tmux session, let's run cmatrix:

cmatrix

That's one Keanu "whoa". Our terminal is now state-of-the-art 1999.

Sessions in tmux can be detached and reattached, without interrupting the program running inside. To detach, type ctrl + b, and then type d. Your session is detached, and you're back at the prompt. When we reattach, cmatrix will still be running, right where we left it:

tmux attach

Let's detach again from our current session (ctrl + b then d), and create another session. This one we'll name, for convenience (and style):

tmux new -s inigo_montoya

And we're in a new tmux session, this one named "inigo_montoya". Let's detach (you should be getting good at this now). At the prompt, list the running tmux sessions:

aqw@medusa:~$ tmux list-sessions
0: 1 windows (created Sun Apr 28 13:09:06 2019) [119x39]
inigo_montoya: 1 windows (created Sun Apr 28 14:00:29 2019) [119x39]

Session 0 is the first tmux session we created (with cmatrix running in it). inigo_montoya is the session we just created. To attach a specific session, run:

tmux attach -t inigo_montoya

Sessions can be quit either by typing exit from within the session, or with kill-session:

tmux kill-session -t 0
tmux kill-session -t inigo_montoya