Re: zsh : launch tmux in just one terminal

[Steve Dondley <s@dondley.com>]

> I wrote a program that jumps my mouse pointer from one terminal to the
> next via hotkeys.  Yeah, when you're in terminal mode, having to reach
> for the mouse just to move from one to the other is really annoying.
> Sounds like tmux handles this itself, but will it jump between
> monitors?  And my program works regardless of the running applications
> so whereas it mostly for use in terminals I can jump between, say a
> browser and my email too.

You can have multiple tmux sessions on one computer. So you culd 
dedicate terminal "A" to tmux session "A" and have terminal "B" show 
tmux session "B" and just use hot keys to switch between them like you 
currently do.

And tmux is fully scriptable. So let's say you want to send a command 
from one pane in session A to another pane in session B, you can do this 
with a tmux hotkey without even leaving the current terminal. It's very 
powerful. I've used feature when I do testing. I'll punch a key and it 
will test the code in the current pane in a completely different 
terminal window running in a different tmux session.

I'm on a mac and I use iterm, which is just a terminal with more bells 
and whistles. I have two monitors. I typically have 3 terminal windows 
open: a vim session open for taking notes, a zsh session for running 
taskwarrior commands, and one with tmux open for all my coding and 
server administration. Within the session, you can have multiple 
windows. I like to use windows for my different projects. So if I want 
to switch to project "A", I hit a tmux hot key to jump to window "A" and 
all the important files are right there, already open in vim and ready 
for editing. Each file is in its own tmux pane, which is running it's 
own separate shell.

At any rate, my notes and tasks are on one display, the tmux session is 
full screen on the other. I use simple hot keys to change focus from one 
terminal window to the other. For other applications like my browser, I 
have hotkeys for those as well.

Well, that's probably more than you wanted to know. Like with anything, 
only you can decide if using tmux is worth the investment of time in 
learning it. If this is what you do for a living, then yeah, you should 
definitely look into tmux as it will likely pay off. If you're more of a 
casual user and just like puttering around on your computer for fun are 
writing simple scripts and issuing a few dozen commands here and there 
over the course of a day, it's probably overkill.