tmux, screen, and Vim terminal mode

Software development often involves more than just writing code: executing your binaries, running tests, and using command-line tools to accomplish certain tasks. That’s where session and window managers come in.

Modern desktop environments allow you to have multiple windows, but we’ll focus on how you can manage the tasks you need to accomplish in a single Terminal session.

tmux

tmux is a Terminal multiplexer: it allows you to manage multiple Terminal windows on a single screen.

Tip

If you’re on a Debian-based distribution, you can install tmux using sudo apt install tmux. You can also build tmux from source, which is available from GitHub: https://github.com/tmux/tmux.

You can start it by invoking tmux in the Terminal:

Figure 5.19 – A tmux window.

Panes are just like splits

tmux allows you to have multiple panes (the equivalent of windows in Vim) and windows (the equivalent...