I actually migrated away from tmux because I became tired of using one set of keybindings to manage my terminal windows, panes and splits, and another set for my file buffers inside Emacs. Now I run my terminal emulator inside Emacs so I get the same keybindings for file windows and terminal windows.

I agree.

I remember "getting into" vim back in ~2018 because I was doing enough work on headless machines that having a "proper" text editing experience became a must. It was only through this process did I learn about tmux and what it offered.

At some point, VSCode's remote features became good enough that I didn't really need vim anymore (granted, it's still my go-to when needed), but I still use tmux constantly. And, of course, tmux with agents is an excellent combination. The fact that I can have my remote agents interact with my existing tmux sessions is the kind of workflow I dreamed of back in 2018.

Regardless, my point is that you hear a lot of praise for things like vim and emacs, but everyone should prioritize learning tmux well enough to at least be able to navigate it and hand over sessions to agents.

If you want a little bit more of a batteries-included experience, Zellij[1] is to tmux what Fish is to Bash and what Helix/Neovim is to Vim. If you like any of those, I highly recommend giving Zellij a try.

[1] https://zellij.dev/

honestly, I use nvim as my terminal (via lazy vim guy's terminal plugin), and I wish that there was a better way to vibe code in just nvim without having to leave it.

I have tried to learn tmux, but the key bindings are really unintuitive to me vs my familiar vim setup

>If you aren't familiar with tmux(or GNU screen), you owe it to yourself to become familiar. If you are a deveoper/sysop/cli-type it will act as a force multiplier.

I tend to use tmux for persistent sessions when ssh'ing to and fro between my own personal machines, but I've never really delved that deep into it when my work computer is a macbook pro and I simply use iterm2 and splits.

Likewise, over on linux, everyone raves about tiling window managers, but I've never really moved beyond a simple L/R split that's easily achievable in every decent floating wm / de.

> If you aren't familiar with tmux(or GNU screen), you owe it to yourself to become familiar

Or just jump straight into herdr which offers a superset of what tmux offers.

15 years ago I thought: should I go all in on i3 or tmux ? both manage windows for me, I don't need to learn both tools. Since I use web browsers for my work, I decided to go all in with i3. I don't regret that choice but I regret seeing the problem as "this or that" when I could have mastered both.

Genuine question: when there's new tech, sometimes it's legitimately useful and hard to appreciate (e.g. Git: it seemed no better than SVN at first, it required new commands to learn, etc.) ... but when you started using it, you soon realized how powerful it was.

To me, Tmux seems ... not a whole lot better than a terminal. I use a regular old terminal that lets me rename tabs (and lets Claude rename them automatically). I also use VS Code where I have a few sessions in separate panes on one screen. Both those features seem to be Tmux's big selling point.

Why would Tmux be so great that I'd want to learn an entire new app and set of keyboard shortcuts: can anyone explain it in a "this Git thing sounds like what you have, but here's all the awesome stuff you can do with Git branches" kind of way?

Came here to add this as well.

tmux is probably my favourite tool by far. I highly suggest going through its documentation (even easier with LLMs now) to learn the basics. It's extremely scriptable.

One of favourite uses of it is its 'popup' feature. Combining the tmux popup with fzf creates a crazy opportunity of whats possible.

Highly suggest learning these tools; literally just point an agent at my comment here and ask it what one could do with tmux popup and fzf combined