Make Tmux the OS

(matduggan.com)

29 points | by weaksauce 11 hours ago

9 comments

  • ssivark 32 minutes ago
    Interesting and expansive post about what the modern desktop experience should be like, and most of it has nothing to do with Tmux except if you squint in some very particular way.
    • pjmlp 9 minutes ago
      Yeah, I was expecting yet another post about going back to 1980's UNIX, CP/M, MS-DOS/Novell, MVS, VMS,... experience from people that didn't had to put up with the experience in first place.
  • phromo 19 minutes ago
    Too bad config is a no go for the poster, otherwise hyprland or i3 would do everything, even the quake overlay.
    • StrLght 9 minutes ago
      I was reading this and thinking about it too — sounds like author wants a tiling WM but with a friendlier UX?

      I honestly don't get why they ignore existing options due to configs. Give it a try, maybe it won't be _that_ bad.

    • chickensong 6 minutes ago
      If he spent half the time it took to write that blog post on config, the problem might be solved.
  • ggm 33 minutes ago
    how can this not refer to emacs?

    emacs -> screen -> tmux -> tmux integrated into <terminal app>

    appears to be the path.

    I guess the fork was "emacs before X" to "emacs after X but we retrofiited some ideas from X into the terminal" -> <the rest is history>

    • pjmlp 10 minutes ago
      I advise to check Emacs history before its widespread adoption on UNIX.

      Especially Zmacs and XEmacs, and how their features eventually found a way back into Emacs proper.

  • erelong 4 hours ago
    Vertical tabs is a feature in some modern browsers (all?), toggled in settings

    Virtual desktops might help some people where you just ctrl+alt+left/right to move to them, instead of multiple monitors (where applicable). Or just fullscreen apps and I think it's like ctrl+tab to switch between a bunch of them

    The only way to keep all the files on the filesystem is probably to avoid the silos

    I guess we could ironically / unironically ask AI for some OS design tips for our setups haha

  • serbuvlad 31 minutes ago
    > The best two examples of this are the Arc browser and Chrome OS. But I think Arc is actually the more interesting of the two experiments. Their first innovation was to break the idea of tabs at the top and instead move it to be a sidebar model.

    I will forever hate Arc for popularizing vertical tabs the way they did.

    Vertical tabs were a thing since at least the Tree Style Tabs extension (2007), except the Tree Style Tabs were infinitely cooler, because they were a tree, not a list, and right click->open in new tab, would open the new tab as a child of the current tab.

    So you could have a hacker news tab during your break, start opening a bunch of articles, read through them, simply un-expand the HN sub-tree, go to work, and then re-expand it during your next break.

    Because of Arc, everyone is now implementing vertical tabs, but no one is implementing Tree Style Tabs, and, probably no one ever will again.

    • scottg489 22 minutes ago
      Check out Tabius if you use Chrome. It automatically creates and opens new tabs in a group as you describe in your second to last paragraph.
    • lemontheme 26 minutes ago
      Fwiw – Orion (webkit) has tree tabs
  • jwrallie 6 hours ago
    Persistence is something I care about, Tmux allow that between different sessions, local or otherwise, Windows Remote Desktop also makes it simple to continue work remotely. What bothers me is that the OS will eventually need to reboot, and the user is expected to reconfigure the sessions afterwards, at least partially.

    I think a modern computer should be able to update its software, kernel included, in a way that the state of the userland could be kept, even with an actual reboot.

    • noman-land 2 hours ago
      Check out tmux-continuum and tmux-resurrect plugins.
      • rockbruno 28 minutes ago
        TIL about tmux plugins. I started using tmux more actively recently and these will solve all my problems!
  • OtomotO 52 minutes ago
    Actually for me it's different.

    I've been using Tmux and later Zellij for many years, while I was on Ubuntu's Unity, then Gnome, KDE, i3 and lastly sway.

    Until I switched to niri (https://github.com/niri-wm/niri) ... since then I haven't used tmux at all.

    Very weird, come to think of.

  • junehwi 26 minutes ago
    [dead]