 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel Today we're gonna talk a little bit about Terminal multiplexers in specifically in their relation to how they compare to window managers now Really this comparison is not fair because terminal multiplexers are a completely different Kind of thing than a window manager and they both have their pros and cons and where you want to use them and so on and so forth But I think it's it's a Reasonable comparison in a couple ways because they do have some similar capabilities and it can be confusing as to what you know What you use them for? so Today I'm going to going to talk a little bit about Terminal multiplexers. I will say this. I am not an expert at terminal multiplexers. I don't use them often very often at all I Do use window managers a lot so? My bias is going to be towards window managers But there are several different reasons why you want to use a multiplexer and we're going to talk about today But first if you could hit the subscribe button, I'd be really appreciative of that We're trying to get to a thousand subscribers by the end of the year Which is still like 11 months away, but January seems to have just I'm still recording this January. I think I'll be posting this and still in January But time is just a fly-in so before the end of the year I'd really like to do a thousand so if you could hit the subscribe button. I'd really appreciate that. Thank you very much so let's Let's just jump right into Talking about this so first let's look at a tiling window manager. This is DWM Say I wanted a couple Terminal side-by-side. I just hit super enter twice Oops, I actually have to be in the right Thing for that and I can just keep pitting them and they just keep tiling and tiling and tiling and tiling It's it's a great thing and it's not just terminals that will tile like this would be any program that you want Say if say I wanted the blue man manager So I just hit my key binding for that and I have blue man manager open there at the bottom That's what a tiling window manager does and It's all well and good and it's what it's it's a Serves its purpose in that it manages your windows of all manages all of your windows How does that compare to a terminal multiplexer? So the one that we're going to be looking at today is called tmux Let's just TUMX and you just enter it and you can it's in the all the repositories It's really easy to download it took like five seconds to download. It's not a big program at all and I know what you're thinking Matt That looks exactly like what you just had and that's true terminal multiplexer basically just allows you to go through and run a shell within kind of within a shell and What's the purpose of this you ask so? There are several different things you can do with the terminal multiplexer the simplest of them is it allows you to run multiple Instances of your console or your shell or whatever in the same window so if I hit control B and then the Shift 5 which is shift of parentheses not parentheses a percentage sign I guess to set two windows side-by-side and I can do it again I can do control B and then percentage sides again, and I get another one It's half half and half so kind of a always half of the other you know window and you can do this vertically too I'm not sure what the key binding is. I'm not that far into it and And If you don't use a tiling window manager, let's say you're on Katie Yeah, you're on plasma or an XFC or whatever and you want to be able to run Terminal side-by-side a multiplexer is a fantastic option because it gives you the functionality of a tiling window manager while still being able to use your desktop environment the issues of comparing them obviously in This sense window managers have a big Advantage because they can run run other programs or other apps You know gooey apps or whatever and manage those windows as well and that you can easily move for it You don't have to worry about the crazy Emacs style key bindings and so you know, it's just easier for what it does And if the argument stopped there window managers would win hands down but it multiplexers and team us team ux like team ux Have other Functionality as well, which makes them suitable for other purposes So if you're if you SSH into servers or other computers or whatever and the connection happens to be shaky or whatever and you lose the connection Something like team ux will allow you to actually Have that Whatever you're doing persist until that connection comes back So you don't actually have to you know lose all of your progress in something because you can just re ssh into whatever you're doing and Continue right where you left off. That's called persistent state. I believe another thing that a Turn on multiplexers will do will they they'll allow you to share Sessions so if you want to I Know and I'm not sure how you do this. I've never actually done it, but you can go through and Create a whole bunch of things that you're doing and you can share that state with another person who uses team up team ux I guess and so that you can both be working on it or So that they don't have to create their own Session in the same thing. So it'd be like you could create a like a Like an SSH session The SSH is into several different servers and you could share that and all the stuff would be going would be transferred over to Whoever you shared it to So those are the big things that terminal multiplexers allow you to do that aren't necessarily capable of being done with Window managers, it's just something that's completely different and It's really, you know Where the comparison between them kind of falls apart because Really the situation here is that window managers are Window managers there they manage windows they The open windows they determine where windows are positioned on the screen and so on so forth. That's what windows managers do Team ux is an application That's what it is. It's completely different. It has some functionality of window managers tiling window managers specifically, but it Has additional functionality that an app would have like the persistent state the ability to share And I'm sure there are several other different things that terminal multiplexers can do that just Can't really be compared to with compared to with Compared to window managers themselves because they're just completely different ones an app ones are kind of like an environment now a Lot of people live in team ux team ux is a lot like like emacs other. Oh, it doesn't have like the application ecosystem. It's more of like a I mean, it's just one single app that you can then run multiple instances of or whatever so But people do Live in team ux a lot. I mean if you all you're using is consoles all the time team ux is great Especially if you're on something that, you know, you can't use like a window manager So you're on like windows or something team ux something or something like team ux is a good option. So That's just a brief kind of very noob way of explaining the differences between them and like I said before I'm not a Expert in any sense of the imagination when it comes to terminal multiplexers I know just the bare basics and when I first started the research for this I Just thought that team ux just allowed you to use You know multiple pains. I think why would you use that? It's the same thing as the tiling window manager Just use a tiling window manager and you're all set But that that persistence date and the sharing stuff kind of turn me away from it. So these are two different things That then kind of share some of the same characteristics, but are really two different things So if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down If you're more familiar with team ux give it a comment and I'd love to learn more Maybe maybe somebody not out there uses team ux for a reason And they want to share that I'd really love to hear from you. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time