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I've once again switched terminals, hopefully this time for good
I've tried them all I think, but these are the one's that mostly come to mind:
gnome-terminal: I remember I used this for a while, until I moved away from gnome and wanted something leaner for my already lean desktop manager.
xfce4-terminal: I love the whole xfce4 desktop, it's just so simple, so cute, so Linux-ey in its modularity, you can install the terminal without bringing the whole house with it. Plus it has tabs and just generally looks great, albeit feels a bit slow and dated.
Alacritty: A few years back I jumped on the gpu-accelerated terminal bandwagon. Was impressed by the speed of Alacritty[1], but not the customizability, and the developer was a bit icy to deal with at times (though, fair, it's his product that he's putting out for free). No tab support though.
Terminator: I switched back to xfce4-terminal for a while, just so that I could get my tabs back instead of spawning a new window, or using suckless's tabbed[2] (which felt lean, but clumsy). So I heard good things about Terminator[3], about how one can easily split and focus windows and create tabs. It's great and flexible and I've been using it for almost a year now without any problems. However it reminded me of something that I already use....
Tmux: So tmux is not a terminal application, but a terminal multiplexer that runs within a terminal. It's mostly a session manager with tons of features like window splitting, tabs, process management, etc. etc. if you just take the time to read the manual. It's essentially a lot like Terminator (sans the process management), but with more pernickety bindings.
My plan now is to switch back to Alacritty (it just feels snappier), and use tmux for tabbing and session management. That is, tmux will be my default terminal a la:
## in ~/.bashrc if command -v tmux &> /dev/null && [ -n "$PS1" ] && [[ ! "$TERM" =~ screen ]] && [[ ! "$TERM" =~ tmux ]] && [ -z "$TMUX" ]; then exec tmux fi
The best part is that Tmux comes with a whole ton of handy plugins[4], where you can integrate cpu+mem+network+weather metrics into the status bar, meaning I can significantly clean up the status bar in my desktop and move everything into the terminal.
Plus you can save and restore tmux sessions across reboots[5], making it extremely handy for overcoming that initial early morning focus-inertia.
I just need to get used to typing C-b C-s more.
Hope this post convinces people that tmux is really more of a desktop manager itself (sans the windows), than just a cool multiplexing tool for detaching processes.
Happy Friday!
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Refs:
I've loved tmux for since before I can remember (which can mean more than one thing at my age...).
I changed the prefix to Ctrl-a not too long into my tmux journey, though.
I think I did that primarily for speed, but wouldn't be surprised if there were a shortcut conflict involved. If so, I can't remember what it was - possibly for having avoided it all these years?
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