alt Hacker NewsGenuine 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?
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does your terminal on your laptop smoothly resize to match the same terminal session constrained by the screen dimensions of the phone you just opened it on so that you can monitor something from either? can you easily switch to a different terminal tab by name based on the output of something you just ran? can you have each ssh login pop open a new gui terminal tab you can later switch to interacting with locally?
I don’t see much of a benefit locally but for remote machines over ssh it’s pretty nice.
Its mostly useful for remote sessions as you can use one ssh connection for multiple terminals, and of course the most common usecase, leave processes running after you logout (or if the connection drops).