This is the first in a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. For the first article, we’ll put tmux under the spotlight.
tmux is a “terminal multiplexer”. This application enables a number of terminals (or windows) to be created, accessed and controlled from a single screen.
tmux runs as a server-client system. A server is created automatically when necessary and holds a number of sessions, each of which may have a number of windows linked to it.The tmux server manages clients, sessions, windows and panes.
The time you spend context switching between an editor and your consoles can devour your productivity. Take control of your environment with tmux, a terminal multiplexer that you can tailor to your workflow.
Installation
If you want to compile the project’s source code, follow the steps below. First, clone the repository’s source code.
$ git clone https://https://github.com/tmux/
You can then compile the source code, and install the software.
$ cd tmux
$ sh autogen.sh
$ ./configure && make -j4
$ (sudo) make install
tmux is a very mature program. So you’ll find packages with all popular Linux distros. It’s also included in OpenBSD.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |