Meetings and Events

Bring a Box, Rock Your tmux(1), Matthew Story
2012-07-11 @ 18:45 EDT (22:45 UTC) - Suspenders Bar and Restaurant +

A good terminal multiplexer is a vital part of the UNIX Developer and Systems Engineer toolkit. For the better part of a decade, I installed GNU screen(1) on each and everyone of my machines, dealing with the lack of useful features, over-abundance of useless features, complex configuration mini-language, and it's preference to setuid to root. Then along came the OpenBSD project's tmux(1), and everything changed.

Core to the idea of tmux(1) is a command interface, used for both configuration and run-time, making it a simple, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use (and configure) tool. In addition to this, tmux(1) gives you vertical and horizontal panes, pane templates, simple pane resizing, and so much more. If you're a screen(1) user, consider this a Screen User's Anonymous session; if you have refused to engage a terminal multiplexer to this point, and your monitor is cluttered daily with 20 - 30 terminal windows ... consider this your salvation; either way, bring your box and we'll get you rocking with tmux(1) in a couple of hours.

Matthew Story is Director of the AxialMarket Corps of Engineers, and a contributor to the FreeBSD project. He regularly uses the small gun; xargs(1) is his favorite program (especially with -P).