Tmux vs. iTerm2 split panes

vim tmux iterm
thatmiddleway picture thatmiddleway · Apr 4, 2012 · Viewed 34.4k times · Source

Why should I use tmux when iterm2 has split panes?

I have never used tmux, and want to know if there are advantages to using that in my workflow instead of the split pane features iterm2 has.

I really like the dimming of inactive windows that iTerm2 split panes offers. Does tmux do something similar?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of each?

Answer

ZyX picture ZyX · Apr 4, 2012

There is another advantage of tmux: what happens if you accidentally close iterm2? If you do it really by accident, you want to reopen everything again. With tmux it is normally as simple as reattaching session without losing anything. Most terminal emulators send SIGHUP to all children which terminates them by default and thus you lose unsaved data (at least, shell and vim command history and other data stored in viminfo) and running processes and thus reopening means rerunning everything.

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