I’ve recently stopped using tmux in favour of relying fully kitty’s built-in windows and tabs, and I’m a fan.
The real killer app for me was the “pass_keys” plugin that allows you to navigate vim and kitty splits all with the same keys. I think there are plugins that allow you to do the same between vim<>tmux<>kitty as well, so it’s not like you would need to drop tmux to take advantage of it.
Anyway, so that’s been a big shift in my daily workflow. I’ve been using tmux for well over a decade, and GNU screen before that (I was never able to train myself away from the C-a prefix.
The one thing I miss a lot is being able to quickly detach and re-attach to existing sessions. Especially when doing some work over an ssh connection. But then I can always just shove the terminal into scratch space, or another i3 workspace.
This isn’t me trying to sell anyone on ditching tmux. I love tmux, and if it works for your flow then it’s perfect for you. More just curious what kinds of setup other people have.
Is there some hot new thing that I’ve missed that blows both kitty and tmux and i3 out of the water? Idk, but I’m always on the lookout. :p
You’re comparing apples and oranges here. Kitty is a terminal emulator, tmux is a terminal multiplexer. They are only tangentially related, which is why…
The one thing I miss a lot is being able to quickly detach and re-attach to existing sessions
I realise they’re different technologies, but for how I use them 90% of the time (launching shells in visually distinct areas of my screen), kitty’s window system is a drop-in replacement.
Tmux is for when you want to keep the state of a shell on a remote server, I guess.
Or any long-running process that’s attached to a terminal for which you can’t or don’t want to guarantee that you keep it open all the time, yet still want to look at the output.
As someone said. they’re different things, though they overlap in some areas.
I’m also using it to script sessions of workflows with many programs, for instance a dev environment with a lot of microservices. Some windows with multiple panes each.
Is there some hot new thing that I’ve missed that blows both kitty and tmux and i3 out of the water?
Zellij - terminal workspace with batteries included
Tried it for a month, but key combos conflict far too often & I do not perceive it as fast as
tmux.Whoa, this looks really good. I love how using the pressing shortcut keys shows you available combinations. Reminds me of the “guided keystrokes” (I think this is what the mechanic is called?) feature of the blezz launcher.
Can recommend as well. I recently checked what’s out when it comes to anything terminal-related and for the multiplexer I landed on zellij. Works well, looks neat, is easy to learn and well configured out of the box.
My current stack looks like this:
- Terminal emulator: kitty
- Terminal multiplexer: zellij
- Shell: fish
- Prompt: tide
I use wezterm, and like the edit mode and the window splitting, but it’s very much designed for vim users and as an emacs nerf herder I just can’t seem to find my home
As a filthy vim hipster, this is really speaking to me…
There’s a ton, but I still don’t find them very useful. The real thing I find dumb is the hardware acceleration for 95% of use-cases. Unless you’re just sitting and watching scrolling output, I don’t see the need to sacrifice efficiency for faster rendering, and even then, I can’t say I’ve had many issues with standard terms either.
Ghostty is the one getting the most hype recently, and it’s alright. It feels more put together than Kitty or Alacritty. Rio is mostly a toy with a bunch of goofy visual effects. Honestly can’t say any of them have features that improve my workflow over just having a bunch of named windows all over the place though.
I use Terminator. It’s nothing fancy but it works fine.
If I work locally, I usually stick several Terminator windows side-by-side and up-and-down in i3 tiles and that’s good enough.
If I work remotely through SSH though - which is 75% of what I do in a terminal, I’ll run tmux so I can have several shells in one terminal of course, but mostly so that I don’t lose what I’m doing if the internet goes down.
