Mosh VS tmux

Try pairing tmux with mosh, it's how I've been working for years whenever I'm forced to admin through a brittle straw. Mosh combats lag pretty well and doesn't care if your connection drops intermittently. https://mosh.org/

Curious what advantages this has over mosh?

https://mosh.org/

Normal ssh is TCP-based. But there is also a different implementation named mosh.

Do you know mobile shell (mosh)? [1]

Seems like most of the features you need are what mosh offers. I've been using it for decades, probably, and it is pretty awesome for latent mobile connections (read as: throttled 2G @16kBit/s).

https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh

I use tmux, but as far as unreliable connections, I've found mosh[0] to be the best solution to the problem (when you have the ability to install it). It basically runs a background process on connection not tied to the session that your client will automatically reconnect to if the connection fails. I regularly close my laptop, travel between home and work, open it back up and the connection is available almost instantly.

[0] https://mosh.org/

If you haven’t already, and I know this doesn’t hold up for GUI emacs or vim, but consider running them through https://mosh.org/

FWIW, I wouldn't try to parse escape sequences "directly" from the input bytestream -- it's easy to end up with annoying bugs. Longer-term it's probably better to separate the logic e.g.:

- First step (for a UTF-8-input terminal emulator) means "lexing" the input bytestream as UTF-8 into a stream of USVs, which involves some subtleties (https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/blob/master/src/termina...).

- Second step is to run the DEC parser/FSM logic on the sequence of USVs, which is independent of the escape sequences (https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser ; https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/blob/master/src/termina...).

- And then the third step is for the terminal to execute the "dispatch"/"execute"/etc. actions coming from the FSM, which is where the escape sequences and control chars get implemented (https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/blob/master/src/termina...).

Without this separation, it's easier to end up with bugs where, e.g., a UTF-8 sequence or an ANSI escape sequence is treated differently when it's split between multiple read() calls vs. all in one call.

Btw, you can use mosh to hide the latency of SSH. https://mosh.org/

If you've used terminal multiplexer in command line, you know tmux is cool! If you haven't, you really should use something like tmux, especially if you SSH into remote servers often!

Additionally, I integrate several CLI tools into my work flow, such as lazygit for streamlined Git operations, yazi as a terminal file manager, tmux for session management, and lazydocker for handling Docker containers efficiently.

3. Running the App Entirely in Docker (with Persistent Data): For devs who prefer a fully containerized development environment, they can now the backend and database in Docker (my personal favorite method). This approach minimizes dependency conflicts and leverages Docker-specific PostgreSQL tools. To ensure persistent data storage, similar to a locally hosted PostgreSQL database, I configured Docker volumes. With Docker volumes, this enabled both staff developers and contributors to fully containerize the application without needing to re-populate the database with each new container. Additionally, this streamlined my pull request workflow as a maintainer, as I no longer needed to manually populate the database from a forked branch when reviewing complex pull requests locally. Of course, there are caveats to this method, forked pull request tests run on my machine using Docker volumes can alter my local database, but I quickly realized I could navigate this using tmux multiplexers or docker-compose.override.yml files (that is for a future blog post).

When systemd broke tmux (which isn't a Linux project, but ported from OpenBSD) and instead of reverting or fixing their own bug, systemd devs went to the OpenBSD folks and asked them to work around the bug that they caused themselves. This is ragebait-level insolence:

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428

This. To add some words why this is important:

Given the remote-first container-based world we're heading towards, decoupling UI (terminal emulator) from its state (tmux, code-server) is a great design decision, which I think will ultimately define what the "next generation" of terminal emulators is. Imagine being able to open tabs directly on remote host, reconnect without losing state, etc, all while using native UI (so Cmd+T to open new tab, Cmd+F to search, etc). Productivity game changer, which currently only the iTerm2 users can fully enjoy.

Ptyxis (putting its state in running containers), WezTerm (native handling of ssh sessions) and VSCode's terminal (starting a proprietary code-server binary and connecting to its TCP port) have reached some of this functionality, but in their design they need some out-of-band mechanisms to do their magic, ultimately limiting the scenarios they can handle.

Meanwhile tmux -CC [0] and ht [1] are sending both their control channel and data channel over the opened terminal itself (in-band), making them flexible enough to support any configuration. Something complex like `ssh jumpbox -- ssh prod -- podman exec -it prod /bin/bash -- tmux -CC` should just work.

[0] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode

[1] https://github.com/andyk/ht

What is tmux?

This also gave me the chance to learn how to use Tmux. Best tool I've learned in a while.

To keep it running in the background we can use tmux

tmux is a powerful terminal multiplexer that enhances productivity by allowing session persistence, window and pane management, and customization through key bindings and configuration files. It supports scripting for automation, facilitates collaboration with shared sessions, and integrates well with various shells and tools.