[em-bee]

tmux supports multiple sessions and switching between those. sessions behave independently like your screen windows. you can of course have multiple windows in each session, which then behave the tmux way. you can also have the same window show up in multipe sessions and use that to emulate screen behavior. (i saw a script to help with that some time ago) for me, multiple sessions alone provide enough flexibility.

[wnoise]

It probably technically does, in a horrifying Turing-tarpit way.

I actually did try to get the behavior I wanted out of nested tmux invocations and a hairy mess of scripts. There was no 'next-session' command (though now it looks like 'switch-client -l/-n/-p' would work. Hmm.)

I couldn't get it to work right, only a half-done approximation, and it involved way too many tmux interpositions.

Screen: client -> per client view of P panes -> P of entire pool of T terminals in session.

Tmux: client -> 1 of S sessions -> 1 of W windows -> P panes

To get splitting at the top level I need one top-level tmux client and its associated top-level session managed by one server. It can actually be locked to one window for what I care about.

In each of its panes, I need to run another tmux client so as to be able to actually change what final pty each pane will display. And each of these need to be separate sessions, so that I can display separate things in each of them. Each of these separate sessions will generally only have one window, with its implicit single pane. I should, of course, run all of these inner tmux sessions as a separate server from the top one.

Now I just have to make restricted keybindings for both the top and inner clients, and make make sure that any binding for the inner clients are replicated as "self-insert" in the top-level client. And remember that there are multiple places I can direct the command-lines (so need two bindings).

This results in the top level server having: client -> session -> 1 window -> P Panes -> P clients

And the bottom server having: P clients -> T sessions -> T windows -> T panes

And this doesn't yet let you have multiple top-level clients attached the way screen does.

I'm sure I could eventually sand off all the sharp edges where it doesn't do what I want and make this work.

Or I could just use screen.

[em-bee]

well if you want an exact emulation of screen behaviour, sure, that may be difficult. but i think you are making this a bit to complicated.

if what matters is that different clients can look at different windows, then using multiple sessions with one window each will get you exactly that.

you may of course need to get used to tmux way of switching sessions (which is not different than tmux way of switching windows). however, i just checked, there is a command to switch to the next session, and you can bind that to a key. add another keybinding to create a new session, and that should get you to about 90% of your expected behaviour without nesting tmux.

[wnoise]

That last 10% matters. I absolutely need split windows, and being able to switch what is in the sub-panes easily. That's what require nesting.

The fact that it also doesn't have my preferred behavior for multiple clients connecting is just a minor nit-pick at that point. And I did say that the misnamed 'switch-client' would likely work.

Tmux has some very nice features: a nice commmand language, xterm-style mouse support, including both event binding and sending to client (pass through only), well thought out client-server separation, the ability for other programs to fairly easily drive it, visual identification of panes, menu-popups, and the default status-line is nicer.

All of that is merely nice to have, not actually needed though. It fundamentally doesn't have a model that works well for me. I wish it did, or that screen gains such things.

[monsieurbanana]

> That last 10% matters. I absolutely need split windows, and being able to switch what is in the sub-panes easily. That's what require nesting.

That could be solved by not relying on tmux for splitting, but on a terminal that has that feature, one ssh+tmux connection by panel.

In any case, it seems that you have put a lot of thinking about this, and probably already considered this solution.

I've been in the situation of trying to make my workflow perfectly fit in my new software/os/laptop/etc and not being able to make it work 100%. It's... sometimes exhausting. Nowadays I take another approach: make it fit well enough.

[em-bee]

one ssh+tmux connection by panel

well that would be like putting two terminals next to each other.

doing that inside the terminal instead has the advantage that it works on remote terminals too.

there is splitvt, but it doesn't seem to be actively maintained anymore

[monsieurbanana]

> well that would be like putting two terminals next to each other.

Pretty much! Not a perfect solution for sure.

I used to only rely on tmux, but nowadays I often prefer opening more terminals windows. I found out that by overly relying on tmux, I kept opened a way too high number of shells (browser tabs, anyone?).

Now for most tasks I open a terminal without tmux, that way I'm forced to close it if I don't want to have a cluttered desktop (I never minimize or hide windows, I don't even know how to do it on my wm).

[em-bee]

oh, i see, i missed that. so you want each of the split windows behave like its own session or something, and switch terminals within that freely.

that does make sense and i can see that's a useful way to work actually.

so how does screen do that?

[wnoise]

> so you want each of the split windows behave like its own session or something, and switch terminals within that freely.

Exactly. Or at least that's one way to describe it, though it might also equally describe other things.

> so how does screen do that?

It's screen's native model.

'C-a |' (split -v) splits side-by-side and 'C-a S' (split) splits top-and-bottom. Screen calls these "regions". 'C-a X' (remove) will remove the current region, letting the sibling take the entire space again. 'C-a Q' (only) will replace the entire layout with the current region. 'C-a tab' (focus) will jump to the next region (it can take directional arguments to move up, down, left, and right, as well as 'prev' to go the opposite way of 'next', but these are not bound by default).

What tmux users would normally think of as window changing commands just switch the current region in the layout between viewing the entire pool of running commands.

[em-bee]

i seem to be missing something. tmux has all those too.