Everyone loves their splitting, multiplexing terminals, but I tried something different this time—I’ve been using i3wm for almost a year, and I really like it. If I need a new pane, I just pop open a new tile.
I’ve never asked if there is a difference between the two. Am I missing out by not using a multiplexer?
Robby Russell is the CEO and co-owner of Planet Argon, a Ruby on Rails development firm based in Portland, Oregon. (and creator of Oh My Zsh & recently launched Maintainable podcast)
Hello! My name is Thomas and I'm a nerd. I like tech and gadgets and speculative fiction, and playing around with programming. It's not my day job, but I'm working on making it a side gig :)
On my Linux box I'm using Awesome WM, but it's the same principle. Why muck around with terminal panes when you have a whole window manager designed specifically for handling windows?
Bonus feature is that you can use any terminal you like without relying on it supporting panes/windows internally.
You typically also get multiple desktops with a window manager (called tags in awesome), so you can have a bunch of sysadmin terminals up on one tag and then either hit mod4+left/right to scroll to the next or hit mod4+number to jump to a specific one. I have mine set up to always open Firefox in a specific tag for example. You can configure different layouts for different tags, and swap layouts on the fly (awesome is a dynamic WM so it supports both tiling and floating windows).
Another bonus feature is it tiles/handles any type of window, not just terminals. So if you want two terminals, a gedit, and a browser up at the same time they all get tiled into the right place.
There's advantages of working in either way, but I'm looking forward to installing Awesome on my machine soon.
I think if you prefer to work on macOS Ali's way + a window management tool (BetterSnapTool is my favourite) is probably ideal.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Yes - if you want to switch to a different session with a keyboard shortcut you have to use generic WM shortcuts and more importantly if you're on a foreign system and create a new terminal it'll be local. With a multiplexer it'll be logged into the remote system (and just as disconnectable as your original session)
I love oh-my-zsh!
Everyone loves their splitting, multiplexing terminals, but I tried something different this time—I’ve been using i3wm for almost a year, and I really like it. If I need a new pane, I just pop open a new tile.
I’ve never asked if there is a difference between the two. Am I missing out by not using a multiplexer?
Same here for i3!
Thanks for loving Oh My Zsh! <3
Thank you for all your continued work on it, Robby!
On my Linux box I'm using Awesome WM, but it's the same principle. Why muck around with terminal panes when you have a whole window manager designed specifically for handling windows?
Bonus feature is that you can use any terminal you like without relying on it supporting panes/windows internally.
You typically also get multiple desktops with a window manager (called tags in awesome), so you can have a bunch of sysadmin terminals up on one tag and then either hit mod4+left/right to scroll to the next or hit mod4+number to jump to a specific one. I have mine set up to always open Firefox in a specific tag for example. You can configure different layouts for different tags, and swap layouts on the fly (awesome is a dynamic WM so it supports both tiling and floating windows).
Another bonus feature is it tiles/handles any type of window, not just terminals. So if you want two terminals, a gedit, and a browser up at the same time they all get tiled into the right place.
There's advantages of working in either way, but I'm looking forward to installing Awesome on my machine soon.
I think if you prefer to work on macOS Ali's way + a window management tool (BetterSnapTool is my favourite) is probably ideal.
Yes - if you want to switch to a different session with a keyboard shortcut you have to use generic WM shortcuts and more importantly if you're on a foreign system and create a new terminal it'll be local. With a multiplexer it'll be logged into the remote system (and just as disconnectable as your original session)
Oh, this! I remember, it’s just been a while. Thanks!
Aside from feature sets, I really rely on love stories when picking out my dev tools.
oh-my-zsh! is one of those things I can't ignore the love for. I'm going to finally give it a dive.
I remember it being kinda slow. I'd recommend using zgen and loading only what you need from OMZ.
Yessss! it's amazing