> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

I was quite recently, but even then remote X is missing a really big usability piece: keeping a long-running application open on the host and periodically connecting to it from a remote node (concretely: connecting to my server from my laptop). VNC/RDP/etc all do this at the desktop level, but they're pretty mediocre experience-wise.

tmux gives me this for terminal applications without really any compromises. I run tmux for local terminals as well as remote terminals; the hotkeys are all deep muscle memory at this point. It just works.