Sunday, June 19, 2011

Anyone interested in Byobu profiles for Tmux?

Last week, my friend and colleague Gustavo Niemeyer introduced me to tmux, modern alternative to GNU Screen.  While I had heard of tmux before, I had never used it.  I spent a few hours this week getting familiar with a handful of how-to tutorials, testimonials of people who have switched from screen to tmux, and of course, the manpage itself.

The short of it is -- I'm really damn impressed!  It seems like a feature-filled terminal multiplexer, with an vibrant community, active developer base, and regular releases.

To get my feet wet this weekend, I started by duplicating many of Byobu's keybindings in my ~/.tmux.conf.  I had to learn a bit about tmux to accomplish that (and even write one trivial patch against tmux to get it working better with gnome-terminal).  You can find my Byobu-like ~/.tmux.conf here, which I've committed to the Byobu source tree and installing from the Byobu PPA packages in /usr/share/byobu/profiles/tmux.  While I have most of the keybindings working, I have not ported over any of the byobu-status scripts yet.  (I'm still thinking about the best way to go about doing that so that they could work with both screen and tmux.)

So I'm curious...
  1. Any Ubuntu/tmux users out there?
  2. Anyone interested in being able to use Byobu's goodness (keybindings, live status information) with tmux (in addition to screen)?

:-Dustin
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16 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 19, 2011 at 11:44 AM

    I am and I'm not alone, I know it for sure ;-)

    I was at your talk at Scale 9x, I wanted to ask you if you were interested giving tmux the same love you gave to screen, but someone else asked before me...
    Tmux is a very nice tool, definitely worth the effort (to unlearn screen)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJune 19, 2011 at 11:00 PM

    Yes, I'm interested. In fact I have been using tmux for quite some time (and mentioned trying it with byobu in #ubuntu-devel about a year ago?)...

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJune 20, 2011 at 6:49 AM

    Hi,

    Although not a tmux user myself i am very interested on getting byobu power running on top of tmux. On late 2009 i was not pleased with screen and some of the tmux's features really made me think of changing, but then i started using byobu and i was hooked, so getting the best of both worlds would be great!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JustinJune 20, 2011 at 9:52 AM

    I did a search for "tmux byobu", and then I come across this post from just one day prior. What are the chances? :)

    Count me in as someone very interested in seeing byobu adapted for tmux!

    [Note: This comment system does not seem to support the iPad. Had to switch my desktop computer to post this. Just FYI.]

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJune 20, 2011 at 1:47 PM

    I've been a tmux user for a while. My DSL link at home is flappy, so i'm often caught in mid-air by a disconnection and i get a new IP. That's very painful, especially when I have several outgoing ssh connections toward my servers, that I need to reconnect manually. I wrote a tmux+ssh wrapper, that I like to call my "unkillable ssh", doing all that for me, for as many windows (terminals) as I want.
    Also useful when I'm in a conference room with intermittent wifi.

    /fta

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJune 20, 2011 at 2:12 PM

    Definately interested.
    I came from screen, switched to tmux quite some time ago and found out about byobu just recently never saw a better screen experience before (however, I will stay with tmux, there is so much active development happening there, so a tmux/byobu would just great.)

    ReplyDelete
  7. HariJune 23, 2011 at 9:09 PM

    I am very interested, in fact found this blog trying to search for a byobu like wrapper for tmux. I am currently still using screen with byobu and have been curious about tmux. If there is byobu for tmux, I would switch in a snap.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AsifJune 24, 2011 at 12:38 AM

    @fta would you care to share your tmux+ssh wrapper

    ReplyDelete
  9. yitzhakbgJune 26, 2011 at 11:16 AM

    I've downloaded the latest byobu (v 4.13) from the ppa, copied /usr/share/byobu/profiles/tmux to ~/.tmux.conf, tried and tried, but cannot convince byobu to run tmux instead of screen.
    How is it done?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Dustin KirklandJune 26, 2011 at 5:22 PM

    yitzhakbg-

    type "tmux" instead of "byobu" for now, after copying over the ~/.tmux.conf. I'll be working on the byobu integration soon...

    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  11. pepoluanJune 29, 2011 at 6:39 AM

    Hi!

    Glad to see a core developer of Ubuntu Server gives tmux some love ;)

    I've installed more Ubuntu Servers than I can count on my hands, and everytime my first instruction after one boots for the first time is always 'sudo apt-get install tmux', followed by retrieving 'tmux.conf' from my internal company webserver into /etcHi!

    Glad to see a core developer of Ubuntu Server gives tmux some love ;)

    I've installed more Ubuntu Servers than I can count on my hands, and everytime my first instruction after one boots for the first time is always 'sudo apt-get install tmux', followed by retrieving 'tmux.conf' from my internal company webserver into /etc

    Honestly, I don't think I really have much use for byobu's realtime information... but then again, maybe because I had fallen in love with tmux (despite no such info), so I refused to see why I need byobu (which does not support tmux yet).

    If you ever need byobu/tmux tester, feel free to contact me. I do lurk in the Ubuntu-Server mailing list. Just find someone whose surname is Poluan, and you got me :)Ubuntu Server gives tmux some love ;)

    I've installed more Ubuntu Servers than I can count on my hands, and everytime my first instruction after one boots for the first time is always 'sudo apt-get install tmux', followed by retrieving 'tmux.conf' from my internal company webserver into /etcHi!

    Glad to see a core developer of Ubuntu Server gives tmux some love ;)

    I've installed more Ubuntu Servers than I can count on my hands, and everytime my first instruction after one boots for the first time is always 'sudo apt-get install tmux', followed by retrieving 'tmux.conf' from my internal company webserver into /etc (color schemes, keybindings, etc.)

    Honestly, I don't think I really have much use for byobu's realtime information... but then again, maybe because I had fallen in love with tmux (despite no such info), so I refused to see why I need byobu (which does not support tmux yet).

    If you ever need byobu/tmux tester, feel free to contact me. I do lurk in the Ubuntu-Server mailing list. Just find someone whose surname is Poluan, and you got me :)

    ReplyDelete
  12. AnonymousJuly 1, 2011 at 11:32 AM

    Didn't actually know about tmux until you mentioned it, but now you've drawn my attention to it... It could definitely do with some better key bindings :)

    ReplyDelete
  13. TonKOctober 18, 2011 at 3:25 AM

    I've been using tmux since version 0.5 (or so) and I really love it. I have used Screen since 1992 and I now only use it for serial connections.

    Have a look at my config at

    http://tonkersten.com/2011/07/104-switching-to-tmux/

    ReplyDelete
  14. ScottNovember 24, 2011 at 11:44 AM

    Dustin! Thanks for pointing out tmux, I've been using it exclusively for about three months now. I would definitely be interested in a port of byobu to tmux.

    ReplyDelete
  15. AnonymousDecember 23, 2011 at 1:42 PM

    byobu+tmux would be great. byobu is the only reason I still run screen (else I am using tmux).

    ReplyDelete
  16. FarazFebruary 8, 2012 at 5:54 AM

    You might find byobu-tmux interesting:

    http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/byobu-tmux.1.html

    ReplyDelete

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin