Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ryannevius 1037 days ago
I may be alone on this, but kitty¹ with sessions has nearly eliminated my use of tmux.

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

4 comments

Any terminal that has rich pane manipulation semantics can serve to take the place of tmux, this includes kitty.

The one thing kitty can't do, however, is have a remote session that keeps your workspace intact. I, and many other devs, purposely disconnect our development from any given machine we're on.

The majority of reboots or other disruptive behavior is because of desktop machines (for those of us that don't use Linux as our primary and only desktop OS); running the tmux session off another machine (even if its just a headless machine under our desk) minimizes disruption due to GPU/etc bullshit.

Terminals are often single platform (I don't know a single one that is cross platform).

If you use multiple OSs, tmux offers a consistency that paned terminals cannot offer.

Alacritty, wezterm, kitty.
I want to add that I've been using tmux for the last decade.

I went from gnome-terminal, konsole, multiple remote ssh sessions (tmux on the remote side for long running sporadic jobs like repairing databases), Windows Terminal, iterm, iterm2, kitty, putty, etc etc etc. From ancient Ubuntu (from CD-ROM giveaway era), to modern MacOS releases, from several Windows releases.

Happy camper of wezterm for the last 6 months. Alacritty as secondary, Windows Terminal on my gaming machine (wsl2 for some stuff).

Between them: still the same tmux config, just evolving, changing plugins, colors of the status pane, adding starship.rs to the mix. Very tempted to try zellij harder, but not sticking to any of these terminal interfaces provided me lots of flexibility and consistency.

Alacritty is not paned, kitty does not support Windows.

wezterm seems actually legit, I didn't knew it. Thanks!

xterm exists everywhere X does (even Windows).
xterm does not have panes or any particular tmux features I'm interested in
I think wezterm should be able to do persistent sessions when its mux server is installed on the remote side.

I will find out more info and come back.

I was told this indeed works.
even locally, when the GUI hangs and i need to restart it (Xwayland still has issues), having most of my work in local tmux sessions saves a lot of time after logging back in.
I had this for a while, I suspect a lot if users are like me (and I assume you) in that the functionality they need from tmux is more or less just tabs and splits (tmux does more than this, but I don't tend to use those features) which kitty replaces pretty nicely.

Since I work across actual Linux and WSL I really appreciate having something that's terminal agnostic like tmux since it means I don't have to have a separate set up when kitty isn't available.

Same here, but kitty is inferior in some respects. I still don't know how to this [0] in kitty...

[0] https://mbork.pl/2022-01-10_Simple_tmux_scripting_revisited

Just fron reading the docs, https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/remote-control/ in general and `kitty @ launch` in particular seem relevant.
Discovering tiling window managers (it was i3, I now use sway) stopped me using it - I only really did for tiling I suppose, then discovered I could have that for other apps too.