[VyseofArcadia]

> It is much more user friendly and usable imo.

I've never quite understood why TUIs on *nix systems seem so downright unfriendly compared to TUIs on ye olde MS-DOS systems. Some of them are excusable, sure. vi predates consumer TUIs, and vim clones it. Emacs at least has a menu bar, even if there's no on-screen indication that F10 activates it.

But tmux was created in 2007. I can think of no reason for it to have such an obtuse UI other than "they're just like that on *nix". Would at be so much to ask to at least by default have a "press C-b ? for help" on screen?

[jbverschoor]

Because of a fixed buffer/direct access to the buffer. Compared to line-based / control code streams

[scientist4397]

Not really true just look midnight commander, it runs under Linux but have the look and feel of an old DOS app :)

[20after4]

It has the look but not the feel. Norton Commander was extremely fast on a 4.77mhz 8088 (basically an 8 bit processor pretending to be 16 bit. It took two clock cycles to move 16 bits across the bus). It's no comparison between those old DOS apps written in ASM that really optimized every instruction for a specific architecture. They felt 100x faster and more immediate than modern computers.

[nequo]

tmux is not entirely dissimilar to GNU Screen which uses `C-a` rather than `C-b` as its prefix key. That conceptual lineage may explain some of the UI choices.