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em-bee 5 days ago

because the OS window manager isn't superior. i have two dozen tmux windows in half a dozen sessions locally. i have shortcut keys to switch between sessions and between windows. i can do that while mixing the terminal with other gui apps. i have yet to find a window manager that lets me group so many terminals into sessions all on the same workspace.

jolmg 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> i have two dozen tmux windows in half a dozen sessions locally.

> i have yet to find a window manager that lets me group so many terminals into sessions all on the same workspace.

Locally-speaking, I don't really see the point of mixing tmux sessions and tmux windows. I wonder if you mean "sessions" -> tmux windows and "windows" -> tmux panes.

What about i3/sway? You can have a tabbed container (functions like tmux windows) with split containers inside (functions like tmux panes). You can even float the tabbed container with all windows organized inside.

em-bee 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't really see the point of mixing tmux sessions and tmux windows.

sessions let you group windows. i have a group/session for each project/purpose. one session is for all remote connections. one for my personal stuff, diary, etc. one for my hobby. one for personal dev projects, one for client work.

sessions also means that i can connect to tmux from multiple terminal windows. i generally have two windows, one for dev work and one for everything else.

generally i feel that having more than half a dozen windows in a session makes the session unwieldy, harder to navigate, because it becomes more difficult to find the window i am looking for.

which would be the same problem if each was a gui window. try to find your way around 20 gui windows.

codethief 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> one session is for all remote connections. one for my personal stuff, diary, etc. one for my hobby. one for personal dev projects, one for client work.

Why would you have all those open at the same time, though? Isn't that incredibly distracting? (Disclaimer: I have no experience with tmux to speak of, beyond briefly trying it once or twice.)

em-bee 4 days ago | parent [-]

not being distracted is the whole point. if i have everything in a window, then i would have 20 windows. that would be distracting. with tmux i only have one visible window and all other windows are hidden, and i switch to the window i want to use. (ok, i could do that with gui windows too, i am just making a point)

these things are open because otherwise i would have to open them and close them every time i want to use them. by keeping them open i can switch back and forth faster. but, while i am not using them they are invisible. and i don't notice that they are there.

jolmg 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> generally i feel that having more than half a dozen windows in a session makes the session unwieldy

> which would be the same problem if each was a gui window. try to find your way around 20 gui windows.

I mean, just like how you can organize tmux windows in tmux sessions, you can organize gui windows in workspaces and containers to arbitrary depths.

em-bee 2 days ago | parent [-]

you can organize gui windows in workspaces and containers to arbitrary depths

which GUI offers that? i have only ever seen a single level: workspaces and windows and tabs. that's not enough.

by using tmux i get those three GUI levels and the three levels of tmux

jolmg 2 days ago | parent [-]

> which GUI offers that?

The ones I mentioned: i3/sway. There's probably other tiling WMs that similarly allow organizing windows into trees of containers of arbitrary depths. The containers being able to be set into 4 different modes for displaying the containers/windows within: split horizontal, split vertical, tabbed, or stacked.

em-bee 2 days ago | parent [-]

very well, thanks. i'll give that a closer look.

5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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boredtofears 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I just logically group tabs into the same terminal window. All OS's have hotkeys for switching between tabs and windows.

em-bee 4 days ago | parent [-]

sure that works, but then you are also using terminal functionality and not the window manager, which still shows the window manager as lacking in features, which was the argument i was responding to.

seriously, a window manager that can group windows and manage those groups would be awesome. workspaces help, but they are often just there, and can't be managed, reordered, named, etc..

actually, i think kde may have some of that functionality.

i still prefer tmux in any case because it is more scriptable, and it provides a detach function. although i recently started exploring wezterm, which can be configured to work like tmux and also has a way to detach and reattach sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762241