tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development

by Brian P. Hogan

Your mouse is slowing you down. The time you spend context switching between your editor and your consoles eats away at your productivity. Take control of your environment with tmux, a terminal multiplexer that you can tailor to your workflow. With this updated second edition for tmux 2.3, you'll customize, script, and leverage tmux's unique abilities to craft a productive terminal environment that lets you keep your fingers on your keyboard's home row. You have a database console, web server, test runner, and text editor running at the same time, but switching between them and trying to find what you need takes up valuable time and breaks your concentration. By using tmux 2.3, you can improve your productivity and regain your focus. This book will show you how. This second edition includes many features requested by readers, including how to integrate plugins into your workflow, how to integrate tmux with Vim for seamless navigation - oh, and how to use tmux on Windows 10. Use tmux to manage multiple terminal sessions in a single window using only your keyboard. Manage and run programs side by side in panes, and create the perfect development environment with custom scripts so that when you're ready to work, your programs are waiting for you. Manipulate text with tmux's copy and paste buffers, so you can move text around freely between applications. Discover how easy it is to use tmux to collaborate remotely with others, and 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.

Genres: Programming, Technical, Technology, Software, Computer Science, Coding, Computers

104 pages, Paperback

Published December 27, 2016

Reviews

[Minh Nhật]

linux, z shell, emacs, tmux là đủ cân cả thế giới rồi :v

[Chaitanya Bapat]

Having used tmux for few years now, this book was a good refresher of the various utilities available through tmux. While tmux cheatsheets generally are more than sufficient to use tmux, this book gives bit more details into why certain keybinding is used for certain task. Few parts were not relevant to me [pair programming, using tmate, copying to clipboard] as I either have better alternatives or no need for it. All in all, okay read.

First time I read a book on Medium!
https://medium.com/pragmatic-programm...

[Matthew]

If you want to become more productive in a command line interface without using a mouse, tmux is a great addition to your computing bag of tools. However, tmux might seem daunting at first—more powerful tools are to novices. That's why it's great that Brian Hogan has written Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development. Mr. Hogan does a great job showing how to both use and configure tmux.

[Ietrio]

An idiotic structure. Working with text and pair programming are after Configuration.

Overall, Hogan has a hard time separating his personal taste, the customs in the Hogan's working environments and the available options. So instead of calling the Prefix Ctrl+B, anything, Hogan will inject a sub chapter "Defining an Easier Prefix" in which he will not only talk about the people migrating from older systems, but also about remapping the keyboard, of course, without describing how. And I have a weird feeling none of the people who are experienced with applications like "screen" would need his book anyway.

Overall, this is not the worst book, but The Tao of tmux: and Terminal Tricks and tmux Taster are much better options.

Or just ditch the over inflated egos of some unknown programmer, read the official documentation and the online tutorials and spend your money on something that might bring you more pleasure.

[David]

Great introduction to this productivity enhancing tool. I wish more tech books were like this one -- short, concise, and full of useful examples. The chapter on cutting and pasting got a little wonky b/c I was mostly using my Mac and cutting and pasting on Macs is a little weird. So I had to search around the Internet some to get these examples to work. The examples in the chapter on plugins also didn't work and required similar extra curricular research to get working. But the object of both those chapters was to make one aware that functionality exists, so for that it was still valuable. Highly recommend this for anyone who spends a lot of time on the cmd-line and who doesn't already know a lot about tmux.

[Fábio Fortkamp]

It's incredible how this little book has influenced my productivity. Birna P. Hogan gets to the point, with practical example of how he uses tmux and how can one configure it (explaining the syntax very clearly), and then introduces various plugins and tools such as tmuxinator.

If you work developing software with terminal tools, you need this book. With a few hours of reading you will work much faster and consistently: with the suggested Tmuxinator, for instance, with a few keystrokes you will always open the same tools, editor windows and console panes in the same locations, exactly the way you want.

As with all PragProg books, way worth its price.

[Luka Ilić]

If you've been using tmux, you can skip the first two Chapters. If you don't plan on using tmux for pair programming (which I'm guessing most people who use tmux won't do), you can skip 5th Chapter. The other 3 chapters were fun and taught me a few bits.

Overall, it's more of a long article than an actual book, so I can't judge it too harshly. It's not a bad way to spend an hour or so, it's a very quick read.

[Camal]

Brian did a great job by just introducing enough Tmux to get started. I really liked that he also shared his personal configurations pretty soon in the book, seeing the benefits of remapping keys made a lot of sense to me.

After finishing the book I feel way more confident to integrate Tmux into my workflow and start my journey from here by finally consulting the man pages of it.

[Ravi Sinha]

I read the first version from the same author several years ago, which helped me set up my first tmux configuration. Said config became a daily part of my workflow. I am glad I picked up the new version - it helped me remember several tidbits that I'd forgotten, learn a few new things, and refresh my configuration and workflow.

[Claudio Noguera]

This is a short book, you could see it as a series of blog posts. Very good tips if you already use tmux or want to use it.

I use tmuxp rather than tmuxinator. And the book is from 2016, but still very useful in 2023.

[Ryan Lewis]

The book was good, especially explaining to someone like me how to use and set up tmux.

But I still fail to see why I would want to use this over modern IDEs. I didn’t see any features that IntelliJ can’t do, and certainly IntelliJ could do it more easily.

[Katrina Payne]

A decent entry point to get your feet wet on using tmux as a way to organise doing stuff in the terminal on UNIX/Workalike style setups. Gives you a few decent tools to do some basic stuff, and allows the reader to go crazy on their own via looking up various resources on the topic

[Mehar Svln]

Super Hero Manual to Tmux2, Succinct guide to tmux2

[Harold Bradley III]

This is a good book for understanding Tmux.

[Josiah]

Great level of organization, technical examples, and simple, clear explanations. I want to more technical books written like this.

[Setia Budi]

This book is a gem, helped me a lot in my journey with tmux.

[Qin Zhong]

https://tmuxcheatsheet.com/

[Abhijeet]

Basic understanding of tmux

[Justin]

Must read for anyone who works in tech.

[Banner B Schafer]

Pretty good but also pretty basic. Definitely a good read to get started with Tmux, but it's not going to provide much mental stimulation. That being said, maybe that's not the point.

[Cheng]

看 missing 课程的时候再次翻到这里，在 goodreads 上看到居然出了第二版。2016 年出版的，新版本需要 tmux 2.3 以上。快速翻完，更新了一下自己的 tmux.conf。

[Alex Serna]

This book is a good quick read to get you started with Tmux. It does not get too fancy but is more than enough to understand tmux configurations you can find online.

[Mohammad Bagher Ehtamam]

it's a really good book with practical examples , I really like the pair programming chapter.

[Stephen]

An excellent and concise introduction to tmux.

[Marius Colacioiu]

Recommended to all developers who spent time in terminal, and want to be more productive. I am using tmux for a few years now and found this book good material to further improve my tmux setup.

[Pete]

As a long time user of VIM and TMUX, I would observe this is a book worth reading. Brian has done a great job of baselining what you need to know, as well as what you should know. The book has a nice linear style of teaching building on what has already been explained. I learnt a number of subtitles of TMUX, as well as some head slap obvious points that I should of known but did'nt. In summary a book that is easy to recommend to both, novice, journeyman and expert.

[Gabriel]

A short and very interesting book, definitely a must read about tmux.

[Arunkumar Maniam Rajan]

Awesome book and a quick read. Well organised with slick tricks. loved it and now have their tmux.conf. slowly increasing my productivity.