 A couple of years ago I made a video about Tmux and at the time I was pretty dismissive of the technology simply because I didn't have a use case for it. While I found all the features kind of, you know, neat and quaint, I didn't really think that they were all that useful simply because I didn't have a use case for them. So they weren't useful for me. And now it's a couple of years removed from that video and I have different needs. My workflow has become more complicated over the course of the last two years. Added computers to my life. I've added different programs and technologies and all those sorts of stuff as I've created this channel, as I've kind of entrenched myself in a different profession or at least advanced in my profession, I should say. And I have kind of just I've changed quite a bit over the course of that time. So I've found now that there are quite a few things about Tmux that do intrigue me and actually may be useful. So I've been using it for the last few days now. And I have a few features about Tmux that I want to share with you guys that actually do change the way I do a lot of things around my technology life. So that's what we're going to talk about today. A few of the features that I really enjoy about Tmux. But before we jump in, if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it really helped the channel. So let's first take a look at Tmux. So this here is Tmux and let's first get my only real complaint out of the way. So we'll talk about the features that I like first. But let's start negative as its tradition. And this isn't really that big of a complaint. It's just that along the bottom, the only way you can tell Tmux is Tmux is that there's a bar along the bottom. Normal terminals don't have the bar, right? The problem is, is if you have a lot of terminals open and you not all of them have Tmux, Tmux can kind of get lost in the shuffle if you're not looking closely enough to see the bar. So that's really my only complaint. I'm sure though that you can customize it to make it look more flashy so that you can tell the difference, but I haven't really gotten that far into it. So that's the only negative. We'll get that out of the way. Doesn't really matter. Let's talk about some of the features. The first feature that I really do like, and I didn't think that I would is the ability to split your sessions. So you do that by hitting control B and then the percentage sign like so. And now you have two sessions running side by side in the same window. Now, when I did that video two years ago, I was dismissive to the max to this feature because I can just hit super enter and actually get another terminal. And I have the same functionality. It's, it's amazing, right? But I've changed my tune a little bit. I still mostly think that if you use a tiling window manager, this particular feature here isn't all that groundbreaking, but I do find that when I'm doing two things that are related to one another, having them in the same window makes a lot of sense. It keeps things more organized. They can interact easier. There's a whole bunch of reasons why this setup is better than having two separate windows. So I can now finally see that, but really where this becomes more powerful is when you keep in mind that this is one team up session running two shell sessions at the same time. And why that's important is because of the second reason why I found team ups to be so incredible. And this is the big one, right? This is the one that I probably should have left led the video off on. But you can detach your team up team up sessions. So if you do control B and then D, it's going to basically kick you back out into your regular standard terminal. And we can tell because there's no bottom bar there at the bottom. Now, in this situation here, we don't have anything running in those term team up sessions or that in that team up session. So it's not that incredible, but I'm going to show you why I think that this is so cool. But what does this actually do? Basically, what it does is that team up is actually still running in a server in the background. It's a service if you want in the background. And that means that those two shell sessions that I had running in team up side by side are still going. They're still there. And why that's cool is because then I can actually do things in those sessions, leave the session or detach the session, I should say, and then go back later. And everything that was running is either still running or at least ran to completion. So let's go ahead and first do this. So I'm going to run team ups, LS just like this. And this is basically going to list the team up sessions that I have. And if I want to reattach those, which means basically go back into one of those. I do team ups, like so a or attack and do also do attach. I just use a and dash T and then the number or the index number of the session. So I'm going to do one, which is usually the last one that I left. So there's that. And you can see those things are exactly the way that I left them. Now let's do this again, but with something running. So first, in this one that we have act active, we're going to do an update. So I'm just going to do an update on this PC, and we'll do just like so. It's going to tell me I have 90 packages to upgrade for them or new. I'm going to do yes, and it's going to do its thing. So it will zipper will do its thing. And then I'm going to control B. And then the left arrow key that's going to go over to the other session, I'll clear this out. And in this one, I'm going to SSH into my homelab server. I'm going to do this. I'll enter my password and then I'll clear that out. Run the effect again. And we can see that this is my homelab server running tumbleweed has a lot fewer packages that I normally have has a different process or all that stuff. So I'm SSH into another machine on the left hand side and on the right hand side. I am updating. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to control B and then D. Now, if we were in a normal session, we'd be thinking, oh, no, I just closed out my update. I'm going to have to start all over again. The horror or I'm SSH into my other machine and I was doing something critical, like transferring a file or unmounting a hard drive or renaming something or running DD, whatever it is. And I lost all that thing. I just corrupted the drive. Nae Nae, that did not happen. So here's where the magic of T much. And this is why I've come completely around to actually using it. So again, I'm just going to reattach that thing. It's just exactly the same number. And we're going to do this. We're going to go in. And as you can see, we're still SSH in on the left hand side. The update is still running. That's awesome, right? That's so, so cool. And like I said, this is not something that everyone's going to have a need for. Two years ago, I didn't I didn't see the need for it because I didn't have. I wasn't SSHing into things. I wasn't doing things where I needed this particular functionality. I do now. And the fact that I have it with Tmux is just super cool. Now, this is like the premiere feature. Like I said, this is the big one. And really, I could just make the entire video about this. And most of it's going to be about this because this is the this is the one this is this feature is the one that has turned me around on Tmux. Because I'm able to do this. I'm able to have split sessions where I'm doing two things side by side. I can detach control B and then D and then go right back into it. And it's just it's been going on in the background. Everything just just is there in the background doing its thing. And I don't need to worry about it. Now, here's another cool thing. If I were to say close the whole window like goodbye. The whole window is gone. Oh, no. Once again, I didn't detach the session. I didn't press the handy dandy key binding Super BD to close it. But if I open up a terminal here and just do Tmux attach one just like so, we can see it's still going on. I just closed the whole window and it's still running. That means that there if you for whatever reason, say you're in plasma and Kaywin crashes or you accidentally kill the terminal window and you're doing something critical, you can come back to it. It's still going in the background. You didn't lose it at all. And that's by default. You don't have to do anything to get that to work. That is so phenomenally cool. And I can't even begin to tell you why. Oops, I'm in the wrong one. So they're just by the way, even just to save you some time if you're going to try this. The key bindings are key cords, not key bindings really, or at least some of them. So in order to switch back and forth between these two sessions, I do control B and then the right arrow key. It those are not all at the same time. So you do control B, let up and then the arrow key. If you wanted to split your key, your sessions again, control B and then the percent sign or the apostrophe sign. That's what you have to do if you want to do those things. Those are separate things are key cords, not key bindings. That's something that you don't really see. If you go Googling on how to do those things, because it's hard to say that this is a key cord. So just kind of keep that in mind. But that's neither here nor there. So this particular feature of being able to have that thing running in the background and know that it's not going to die because you accidentally closed it or you wanted to go do something else is phenomenal. It's so, so, so good. So those two features are the two features that I just have found so amazing. And those are like the two main features, right? I'm sure that there are other features that I would I'm probably going to discover here in the next few days that I would wish that I put in this video. But those are the two features that I just truly honestly think that it's going to change my workflow period. I think that eventually there's going to come a time where I'm like a lot of the other team users who will just launch every shell session in the team. So that I don't have to ever just be around. My regular shell session. I'm actually in team ups all the time because that ability to detach the session and have it detach itself automatically. If things were closed is phenomenal. It's just life changing. And I'm astonished at myself that I didn't realize how good that particular feature was back when I made that first video about it. Because even though I wasn't doing a lot of the stuff that I do now back then, I still should have been able to see the benefits of having this particular feature just all the time. Like it's basically a failsafe against you accidentally closing the window. Right. Just that one minor protection makes a lot of sense. But apparently I didn't. Now I do. And I'm very happy that that I did. So those are the two reasons why I've found team ups to be awesome over the course of the last couple of days. And like I said, I'm sure that I will talk more about team ups in the future, probably in the podcast or whatever. But this is really cool. And I think that for those of you who didn't like, I don't have a reason to use a terminal multiplexer. Right. I don't have a reason to use it. But I think that more people have a reason to use a terminal multiplexer than they then think they do. Right. And the reason why I say that is because it does have that feature of being able to detach the session and resume it. That's such a great feature that I think a lot of people could take advantage of it and be happy that they did. It could save a lot of people a lot of time and it allows, especially I think that this would be particularly useful, not only in like a big grand complicated situation, kind of like mine, but if you're just on a laptop and you want things to run in the background and you don't have multiple screens all over the place, being able to run something in a terminal, detach the session, close the terminal or minimize the terminal or whatever and have that thing keep going and then go back to using the browser or whatever. That allows you to multitask a lot easier because you don't have the fear of that window getting closed or lost or whatever. And, you know, it could be very useful in that situations too. So your workflow doesn't have to be very complicated. Your setup doesn't have to be very complicated for this to be super useful. So those are the couple of features that I truly find Tmux to be awesome for. If you have thoughts on other features about Tmux that I should check out or if you have all the suggestions, you can talk about those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Massadon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. You can also head on over to the store, which is available at shop.thelynxcast.org. There you'll find hats and t-shirts and hoodies and desk mats and mugs and cups and all sorts of stuff. All the sale from the merch goes directly towards helping me make more Linux content for you guys. So thank you so very much for watching. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Also, I apologize if this video was a little bit all over the place. I had to record it four different times. The first three were in Wayland and yeah. Something's going on there. Hopefully this one ended up good and I didn't just jinx it. Anyways, thank you so very much for your support. As always, thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.