Tactical tmux: The 10 Most Important Commands

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2025-01-19 08:30:02

tmux lets you keep things running persistently on servers, so you can disconnect and connect as needed without interrupting tasks that are in progress.

If you invoke tmux by itself, you’ll get dropped into a new session. And if you exit this session, you drop right back into your normal shell.

Another feature of tmux is the ability to break your session into more discreet components, called windows and panes. These are good for organizing multiple activities in a logical way.

Windows are for projects within that theme. So perhaps within your experimentation session you have a window titled noderestapi, and one titled lua sample.

Panes are for views within your current project. So within your sysadmin session, which has a logs window, you may have a few panes for access logs, error logs, and system logs.

Consider using as few sessions and windows as possible. Humans aren’t as good at multitasking as we think we are, and while it feels powerful to have 47 panes open it’s usually not as functional as you’d imagine.