tmux VS wezterm

Instead of opening a bunch of terminal tabs or windows, I switched to tmux. It lets me manage multiple sessions in one window, split panes, and run different services side by side. It’s lightweight, keyboard-driven, and fits perfectly with NeoVim.

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

-- https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/3299#issuecomment-2145712082 wezterm.on("gui-startup", function(cmd) local active = wezterm.gui.screens().active local tab, pane, window = wezterm.mux.spawn_window(cmd or {}) window:gui_window():set_position(active.x, active.y) window:gui_window():set_inner_size(active.width, active.height) end)

I tried WezTerm recently but I unfortunately could not type backslashes on an ISO keyboard. There were other minor annoyances such as new tabs always opening on the last directory I was at and not my home directory (this was something that could be configured, but I never managed to do it). Ultimately, it was the problem with the backslashes that drove me back to iTerm.

https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/4051

It is just fuzzy from zooming up screenshots, a by product of the subpixel aliasing.

If it doesn't, you could probably add a post processing filter to https://github.com/wez/wezterm or https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

O emulador de terminal que uso, WezTerm

wezterm (Linux, Macos & Windows)

A month ago, I came across WezTerm, a new GPU-accelerated, cross-platform terminal emulator written in Rust (and I’m not a Rust fanboy, for real!). It piqued my interest, so I decided to give it a try.