tab-rs VS mtm

If you want to read some code, my project is tab-rs.

I myself use the many (alacritty) terminals + tiling WM solution at the moment (switching between i3wm and LeftWM) but it doesn't feel optimal. I always though tmux looked too involved to learn so I've been on the lookout for alternatives such as Wezterm (a terminal with built-in multiplexing), tab (a command line controlled multiplexer) and now zellij.

Plus a lot of cleanup in the tab-pty-process crate. It now exposes an interface similar to portable-pty, but with non-blocking file handles.

I ended up writing a terminal multiplexer because screen and tmux were too complicated to use. It has a built in fuzzy finder, stateless navigation, and YAML configs for persistent sessions: https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs/

The way I typically unify messages is define an enum, and map/merge channel receivers. tokio-stream would probably work with these examples. Here's an example from a fuzzy-finder implementation: https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs/blob/main/tab-command/src/service/terminal/fuzzy.rs#L332

Really nice cheat-sheet write up on screen & tmux & byobu.

Also worth checking out tabs-rs[1] which seems very well reviewed & recent.

Personally, I am a huge fan of dtach[2][3], which isn't a multiplexer, just a detachable proxier of terminal sessions. This let's me run a persistent vim session that I can reconnect to, and vim has however many terminals I need open in it. Vim does my multiplexing, dtach just allows me to make vim persistent. Very glad to have re-discovered dtach, to enable this workflow.

Notably dtach is very lightweight. Unlike tmux, it is not a virtual terminal. Upon reconnect to my vim session, I issue a control-l to refresh the screen. Dtach hasn't retained the screen state, isn't translating between terminfos. The one thing that can go wrong here is connecting from different terminals- few programs have a way to update the TERM setting once the program has launched.

[1] https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs

[2] https://github.com/crigler/dtach

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dtach

The nice thing about that is that many other tools can work too. Someone using direnv can set properties that would be available in the hurl script. Likewise, someone using tab could have environment variables defined for their active tab that could be used. If you invent your own notion of an environment, you lose interop with a lot of other tools that target the standard environment.

Are you running v0.5.3? I just released a fix for a Kakoune issue that was caused by add-highlighter global/ number-lines -relative in kakrc. It sounds similar to what you described.

There are also some crazy ANSI sequences that cause the terminal emulator to write stdin - so applications can query the terminal state. Crazy stuff can happen when those sequences are copied from the scrollback buffer (which is why tab now filters them out).

You can try looking at projects like mtm to get an idea of what is needed.

There is also mtm that comes to my mind

I have been using tmux for a while, and to be frank it is not that great. I constantly have issues with the copy and paste modes, it always spawns a session handler which I often don't want, it is all around pain in the ass. I tried using dvtm for a while, but in the terminal, I tend to prefer a more free flow and manual pane management-style. Doing some research I found a multiplexor called mtm which seems to be what I am looking for. The issue is it is missing a few features: