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Tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development

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It’s pretty common for a modern developer to have a database console, web server, and a text editor running at the same time. Switching between these with the mouse takes up valuable time and can break your concentration. By using tmux, you can improve your productivity and regain your focus. This book will show you how.

You’ll learn how to manage multiple terminal sessions within tmux using only your keyboard. You’ll see how to manage and run programs side-by-side in panes, and you’ll learn how to create the perfect development environment with custom scripts so that when you’re ready to work, your programs are waiting for you. Then you’ll discover how to manipulate text with tmux’s copy and paste buffers. Once you’ve got the basics down, you’ll discover how easy it is to use tmux to collaborate remotely with others. Finally, you’ll explore more advanced usage as you manage multiple tmux sessions, add custom scripts into the tmux status line, and integrate tmux with your system.

Whether you’re an application developer or a system administrator, you’ll find many useful tricks and techniques to help you take control of your terminal.

88 pages, ebook

First published February 29, 2012

23 people are currently reading
390 people want to read

About the author

Brian P. Hogan

20 books10 followers

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5 stars
123 (24%)
4 stars
241 (47%)
3 stars
124 (24%)
2 stars
18 (3%)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
Profile Image for Michał Szajbe.
35 reviews6 followers
April 10, 2013
Very short book., It definitely does not exhaust the topic, but is a good introduction to tmux nonetheless. I like that author didn't just list and explain tmux features, but also shared his experiences of making working with tmux more effective (e.g. by changing unfortunate default key bindings) which makes this book something better than usual manual.
Profile Image for Max Darling.
74 reviews4 followers
May 18, 2022
Boring. The Tmux spec is short and easy enough to read on one's own. Thus what I wanted was a compelling reason to use Tmux, to be sold. I didn't get that. Aside from remote sessions(?), it seems Vim/Emacs can do everything Tmux can do, from window management, terminal emulation, scripting language, etc. And to add insult to injury, Vim/Emacs don't require learning a new DSL. Huh...

I'm either 1) right about Tmux being shit, or 2) wrong about Tmux being shit. Notice, however, that both imply that this book is shit ;)
14 reviews
November 2, 2020
Good book on the basics and configuration of Tmux. It’s a rather small book but that is not a disadvantage. I would have seen more on working with emacs with tmux or nano. Vi(m) is described however. One could argue to discuss Byobu as well. A nice thing is the command summary at the end of each chapter. Also nice to read about is the pair programming use case.
Maybe nice to add more other use cases.
Profile Image for Steve B.
1 review2 followers
May 1, 2018
Get a overview after I first met Tmux. More like an intruction. At least for me, it is a good start.
Profile Image for Colle Owino.
82 reviews24 followers
March 21, 2019
It was a joy to read. Although it was tiny, it was straight forward and to the point. Telling you what commands to run, why you are running them and the pitfalls you might run into.
8 reviews
June 16, 2024
⊙△⊙ 又一个神器啊!
Profile Image for Venkatesh-Prasad.
223 reviews
January 15, 2017
Tmux (like screen) is an indispensable tool if you work on remote servers or execute long running processes/tasks. This book provides is a short and swift introduction to this tool. It covers all the features of tmux that can help with tasks in both developer and sysadmin roles.

Having read the first edition and skimmed the second edition, I did not find a huge delta in the information catered in the second edition. So, I don't see a point in upgrading to the new 2016 edition if you have the old edition.

Since it is a short book about a simple tool, one could ask if the information in the book can be gleaned from the tool documentation. I'd say yes but with some or quite a bit of effort. This book introduced to various features and settings with illustrations and then provides the settings for use via the web.

Overall, a good book to learn, use, and configure tmux. Highly recommended it for developers or sysadmins.
Profile Image for Stefan Kanev.
125 reviews239 followers
April 21, 2012
It's a very short book.

A nice introduction to tmux, but it feels more like a long tutorial than a book. As someone, who has been using tmux a lot, but hasn't fully read the man page, there was some interesting insight. The book is worth purchasing if you are completely new to tmux and you want to get up to speed fast. If you have been using it for a while, chances are that you won't learn many new things. It includes just a couple of things you cannot find on the man page.

A good upside, is that you can read the book very quickly and the stuff in there sticks. I went through it in less than an hour. You'll rarely open it again, though.
Profile Image for Mark Ryall.
45 reviews2 followers
March 10, 2012
Great intro to a completely awesome tool.

You could probably piece together all of the advice contained in this mini book from blogs, stackoverflow and tmux documentation but it is certainly more convenient to have everything consolidated and presented so clearly.

Not that it was ever uncool but the attention of the technical world seems to have refocused on these tiny specialised *nix tools that combine together in incredibly powerful ways as opposed to the massive lumbering memory hungry IDEs.
Profile Image for Sergei.
8 reviews8 followers
June 21, 2012
A useful introduction. Looks like tmux is a better alternative to screen, especially if you need to share sessions between different unix users.

I still think that Emacs could be an even better terminal multiplexer, but because of small issues like a quirky Ctrl-C support, problems with processes generating lots of output, lack of readily available useful shell features like Alt-. (yank-last-arg), I tend not to use shell-mode and eshell-mode that much.

So maybe tmux can be a viable compromise between a shell in the plain terminal and a shell in Emacs.
48 reviews2 followers
October 23, 2012
It was a very quick reading as the book was short, concise and extremely useful.. I already migrated to tmux, dropped macvim and using vim from the console. As I am vim user for a longer time this shift was pretty natural for me. I appreciate that there is now no skipping between the editor and the console.

I highly recommend this book to anyone using console and editor (emacs or vim) in his/her workflow.
Profile Image for Anton Antonov.
356 reviews51 followers
November 25, 2015
A gem for every productivity perfectionist. Tabs are inefficient, multiplexers as tmux/screen are the future!

Screen users may find tmux as a downgrade at start, since the default keybinds are a nightmare, but with tmux: Productive Mouse-Free development, you can tweak every bit of tmux to make full use of all its features, succeeding GNU screen.

Extra credits for mentioning workflow, pair programming and awesome tools as tmuxinator that are an absolute need for the perfect automation.
27 reviews1 follower
May 8, 2012
Excellent introduction to making tmux productive, with great hints at how to set up a good workflow in it.

However, it is strongly biased towards using VIM style keybindings and as an editor, so if you use Emacs (or some other editor), you'll want to spend some time thinking about how better to set up your keybindings.
Profile Image for Vitor De Mario.
26 reviews6 followers
August 21, 2013
Original review: Serves as really nice introduction.

Edited review: After a while has passed, I see that my original review was not fair. I only gave this book 3 stars, but it has since become the very basis of my daily use of tmux. tmux has been essential to my workflow and all my configs and my understanding of it come from this book. It is great.
Profile Image for Alpha.
449 reviews10 followers
November 30, 2012
3.5/5 - Great guide to tmux, although I was already familiar with probably the first half of the book. That being said, I still picked up a few tips from those sections, learned much about tmux's panes, and it's nice to have a comprehensive guide to using tmux for pair programming. Probably most useful to a tmux newbie, but not as useful for someone who already uses tmux's sessions and panes.
25 reviews50 followers
September 12, 2016
Really short and simple, eager to put what I learned to good use! It isn't the whole encyclopedia on how to use tmux (is there even one at all?), but it gets you started and provides enough tips and tricks to see why knowing how to use it would be useful for anyone who spends a good amount of time in a command-line environment.
Profile Image for Не.
4 reviews3 followers
July 30, 2014
Nice and short book.

I liked the "For reference" pages after every chapter. This book feels more like and introduction tutorial to tmux than a cookbook. If you are new to tmux or haven't heard about it, you should grab this book. It was pleasant to read and I think that more tools can benefit from a short introduction books like this one.
Profile Image for yacoob.
248 reviews7 followers
July 6, 2015
Short and to the point. I believe it was written with a specific audience in mind, namely modern devops developer that may be only partially familiar with Unix. It's still useful to other folks, you might just disregard certain general tips. The book gives a good overview of tmux capabilities, and will probably be a good resource for any GNU screen oldtimer that wants to switch.
Profile Image for Philip.
31 reviews
January 18, 2016
Great introduction to tmux. It's an easy read (67 pages) and you will learn a lot. You will also end up with a good configuration file that is much better than the standard settings.

If you find yourself in the terminal from time to time, and want to learn more about tmux and how it can make you more efficient - then you should read this book.

Profile Image for Richard.
Author 4 books13 followers
February 10, 2016
A short and useful introduction to using tmux for anyone who hasn't touched it before. Well worth the time reading it, for Mac or Linux users.

Although a few of the settings are out of date (it's for tmux 1.x), it really didn't make a big difference. The corrections are just a small search away.
17 reviews
April 7, 2012
This is a great little book. I suspect that there is nothing in here that is not available on the web but this book is an excellent reference with many examples and through explanations. I suspect that I'll refere back to it a lot.
Profile Image for Clayton Parker.
9 reviews2 followers
April 15, 2012
Great tutorial on using tmux for everyday development. I was very curious about the potential for using it for pair programming from remote, seems very viable. It's a quick read and there are excellent examples throughout the book.
Profile Image for Joshua.
87 reviews15 followers
July 4, 2012
Useful little book! Of the tips I was not already using, at least 1/3 have made it into my config. I love the idea of scripted environments and even if I had considered it on my own I would have made several n00b mistakes which this book got me past.
Profile Image for Darcy.
29 reviews9 followers
May 23, 2012
This book is short, but an excellent tutorial to get you going. I already knew a bit about tmux when I started this book, but it filled in a lot of the blanks and provided a lot of good tips around usage and configuration that I would have taken me much longer to figure out on my own.
8 reviews
July 21, 2012
I started reading this book as frequent user of screen. About two chapters in I had decided to switch to tmux. By the end of the book, I was advocating tmux to my co-workers.

Short, friendly, and to the point.
Profile Image for Larry Wright.
24 reviews1 follower
December 25, 2012
Short but great book that covers the basics of tmux. It gives real world use cases of how to configure and use tmux to make your life easier. If you use tmux or are at all curious about it I would highly recommend this book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews

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