Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

• shpool

  8 1,141 8.9 Rust

  Think tmux, then aim... lower

  

  You definitely don't need the in-memory terminal emulator to handle resizes or allow attaching with multiple local terminal emulators, since dtach does both and does not have an in-memory terminal emulator.

  > I'm actually confused about why they'd go to the effort of implementing a VT100 emulator, write the code to redraw the screen from it

  Well, we kinda cheated here. shpool_vt100 is just the already existing vt100 crate with a single critical bug fixed, so it actually wasn't much work :). Turns out having a nice package manager for a systems language comes with some benefits.

  I'm actually open to adding a feature to allow multiple simultaneous connections to a single session. I never really had a usecase for it personally so I haven't prioritized it, but it is something that similar tools support and people keep bringing up. Since this isn't the first time I've heard people talking about it, I just made https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool/issues/40 to track work adding the ability to attach multiple clients to the same session.

  > This feels like it sits in a weird place between simple, crude tools like dtach, and tools like tmux; shpool has done most of the work to implement tmux-style behavior, and then decides to cut weird corners.

  I'm not aware of any tool that does internal rendering and subsetting handling scrollback and copy-paste in a way that I personally find usable, so these decisions were very much intentional.

  I think tmux is a great tool for a lot of people, and I tried to get into it for years, but I could just never get over the weird scrollback and copy-paste issues or the fact that it meant that I couldn't use my normal `i3`/`sway` bindings to switch between terminals inside a tmux session. If tmux works for someone, I think that's great and they should keep using it. shpool is meant for people like me who aren't very good with computers :).

• InfluxDB

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• dotfiles

  1 0 2.0 Emacs Lisp

  My personal dotfiles (by whalesalad)

  https://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf...

  Scrolling works pretty well for me.

• kitty

  302 23,753 9.9 Python

  Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

  Oh, this might be the missing piece of the puzzle for me to get rid of tmux!

  I've been using screen/tmux for a long time. Recently I switched to kitty[0] locally. I like kitty a lot! But I've been stuck with tmux on my servers for session persistence.

  [0]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

• iTerm2

  188 15,123 9.8 Objective-C

  iTerm2 is a terminal emulator for Mac OS X that does amazing things.

  Don't overlook the awesome "automatically bury session" option, which hides the "actual" iTerm2 window running the tmux control plane: https://iterm2.com/documentation-buried-sessions.html and this is the preference I mean: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/v3.5.2/Interfaces/Pr...

  I also have dedicated .ssh/config entries for ensuring that ssh connects directly to tmux:

    Host whatever-mux

• Mosh

  156 12,552 0.0 C++

  Mobile Shell

  

  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

• jj

  107 8,189 10.0 Rust

  A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful

  Change-Id likely(?) comes from https://github.com/martinvonz/jj, which is used internally at Google with the Piper forge. (I think, I am not a Googler, just a happy jj user)

• tmux

  218 34,460 8.3 C

  tmux source code

  

  > tmux/screen do not break copy-paste

  Tmux breaks interacting with the clipboard so much that it has its own dedicated Wiki page dealing with all of the different issues and settings: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard

• SaaSHub

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• Navigator.nvim

  12 391 0.0 Lua

  :sparkles: Smoothly navigate between neovim and terminal multiplexer(s) :sparkles:

  It's not i3/tmux, but a similar problem exists for vim/tmux, where the vim window management keys will conflict with tmux's.

  And there's https://github.com/numToStr/Navigator.nvim that unifies the keys by letting the outside layer (tmux) always ask the inside layer (vim) before any movements.

  Although that is indeed a lot more setup. But works pretty well.

• abduco

  7 740 0.0 C

  abduco provides session management i.e. it allows programs to be run independently from its controlling terminal. That is programs can be detached - run in the background - and then later reattached. Together with dvtm it provides a simpler and cleaner alternative to tmux or screen.

  It would be interesting to compare with abduco

  https://github.com/martanne/abduco

• tmate

  39 5,609 0.0 C

  Instant Terminal Sharing

  

  Have you tried https://tmate.io/ ? It's a fork of tmux that, on startup, gives you web links and ssh connection strings to connect to the session. For each connection method you get one adress for read-only access and one for normal access.

Suggest a related project