I'm all for experimenting with new ideas, however this seems to duplicate all the conceptual shortcomings I see in tmux.
First of all, session support and terminal multiplexing are two distinct features which shouldn't be intermingled. What ever happened to the Unix principle of doing one thing and doing it well? My take on this problem is a combination of abduco[1] and dvtm[2].
Next a built in copy mode seems wrong, there is no need to implement vi(m) or emacs key bindings when you can make use of the complete editor. That is why dvtm uses my vim clone vis[3] as a filter: the terminal (scroll back) content is piped to $EDITOR and whatever the editor writes to stdout is kept in a register to be pasted in other terminal windows.
Furthermore I think the completion menu should also be implemented as a standalone tool (using e.g. dmenu or slmenu) as is done for the vis file open dialog.
As a last point I consider Pyhton not really suitable for core system tools, if you want something more expressible than C then something like Rust would probably have been a better choice.
A Slashdot user named sczimme asked Pike this question: Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?
Rob Pike's reply was: Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.
(author). This is the first release of Pymux. It should be stable and usable for daily work. However, don't hesitate to create a GitHub issue in case you feel that it lacks some features/responsitivity or when you'd like to see something different. Expect to see more progress in the coming months. Jonathan
Three things I care about are byobu, mouse support and tabs.
Being able to make byobu use this instead would make adoption really easy. Hopefully just documentation and changing one byobu setting for a different binary name somewhere.
Tmux has mouse support but it seems to require config settings (ie doesn't happen by default). I'd rather mouse stuff just works out of the box with no configuration and does the right thing.
I like tabs in the terminal (eg Gnome-Terminal on Linux). I believe there is a Mac term emulator that can map the different screens to tabs. Byobu does help a lot with this, but it would be nice if the terminal can do so too.
Thanks for allowing different viewers to see different screens at the same time. tmux's behaviour of making every viewer see the same one at the same time is highly annoying. (Yes I know there are ponderous workarounds, but seriously?)
I'd love to see the ability to attach a GUI terminal with tighter integration. I use GNOME Terminal, for example, and when connecting to a multiplexer I'd like every screen to appear as a tab, with the ability to detach again later. I believe iterm2 does this, but it is OS X only.
This is the only thing I currently miss with screen/tmux/byobu.
There are way too many negative remarks about this project. It took a lot of effort to share this project with the world. Presenting alternatives projects and arguments against pymux is a direct assault on everything good about open source, python, and our hacker news community.
There are multiple patches for tmux floating around. One of them is even correct, if you want 24bit tmux. My arch and nix machines are both running it.
To some extend, pymux is a clone of tmux. This means that all the default shortcuts are the same; the commands are the same or very similar, and even a simple configuration file could be the same. (There are some small incompatibilities.) However, we definitely don't intend to create a fully compatible clone. Right now, only a subset of the command options that tmux provides are supported.
Pymux implements a few improvements over tmux:
There is a completion menu for the command line. (At the bottom of the screen.)
The command line has fish-style suggestions.
Both Emacs and Vi key bindings for the command line and copy buffer are well developed, thanks to all the effort we have put earlier in prompt_toolkit.
Search in the copy buffer is highlighted while searching.
Every pane has its own titlebar.
When several clients are attached to the same session, each client can watch a different window. When clients are watching different windows, every client uses the full terminal size.
Support for 24bit true color. (Disabled by default: not all terminals support it. Use the --truecolor option at startup or during attach in order to enable it.)
About the performance:
Tmux is written in C, which is obviously faster than Python. This is noticeable when applications generate a lot of output. Where tmux is able to give fast real-time output for, for instance find / or yes, pymux will process the output slightly slower, and in this case render the output only a few times per second to the terminal. Usually, this should not be an issue. If it is, Pypy should provide a significant speedup.
The big advantage of using Python and prompt_toolkit is that the implementation of new features becomes very easy.
This is a frequent and IMHO mostly weird question. I understand the "why reimplement XYZ in $YOURFAVORITELANGUAGE just to have XYZ in $YOURFAVORITELANGUAGE" sentiment but there is an equally valid benefit in using uniform tool stacks. I am a Python developer. I am comfortable working in other languages, and contributing patches to tools written in other languages, but there is a real benefit to having a full toolset written in a single language even if some of those tools are less developed than their counterparts.
This is besides the benefit that even though you might not need tmux in Python, having tmux in Python might have created tmux-the-library which someone might later need.
(I haven't yet tried this but I plan on doing so. On an unrelated note, thanks to the author for making this pure Python, and for caveatting "it's not as fast as C" with "but try PyPy").
[+] [-] martanne|10 years ago|reply
First of all, session support and terminal multiplexing are two distinct features which shouldn't be intermingled. What ever happened to the Unix principle of doing one thing and doing it well? My take on this problem is a combination of abduco[1] and dvtm[2].
Next a built in copy mode seems wrong, there is no need to implement vi(m) or emacs key bindings when you can make use of the complete editor. That is why dvtm uses my vim clone vis[3] as a filter: the terminal (scroll back) content is piped to $EDITOR and whatever the editor writes to stdout is kept in a register to be pasted in other terminal windows.
Furthermore I think the completion menu should also be implemented as a standalone tool (using e.g. dmenu or slmenu) as is done for the vis file open dialog.
As a last point I consider Pyhton not really suitable for core system tools, if you want something more expressible than C then something like Rust would probably have been a better choice.
[1] https://github.com/martanne/abduco [2] https://github.com/martanne/dvtm [3] https://github.com/martanne/vis
[+] [-] winestock|10 years ago|reply
Rob Pike has the answer for you. http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pi...
A Slashdot user named sczimme asked Pike this question: Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?
Rob Pike's reply was: Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.
[+] [-] mhuffman|10 years ago|reply
https://mosh.mit.edu/
[+] [-] jonathan_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerbinns|10 years ago|reply
Being able to make byobu use this instead would make adoption really easy. Hopefully just documentation and changing one byobu setting for a different binary name somewhere.
Tmux has mouse support but it seems to require config settings (ie doesn't happen by default). I'd rather mouse stuff just works out of the box with no configuration and does the right thing.
I like tabs in the terminal (eg Gnome-Terminal on Linux). I believe there is a Mac term emulator that can map the different screens to tabs. Byobu does help a lot with this, but it would be nice if the terminal can do so too.
Thanks for allowing different viewers to see different screens at the same time. tmux's behaviour of making every viewer see the same one at the same time is highly annoying. (Yes I know there are ponderous workarounds, but seriously?)
[+] [-] ihsw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlpb|10 years ago|reply
This is the only thing I currently miss with screen/tmux/byobu.
[+] [-] effenponderousa|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrenky|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otiger|10 years ago|reply
This is the only feature I miss with Tmux since I've been using Neovim with 24bit colors for a while.
[+] [-] jonathan_s|10 years ago|reply
pymux --truecolor
[+] [-] ossreality|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melted|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|10 years ago|reply
Compared to tmux
To some extend, pymux is a clone of tmux. This means that all the default shortcuts are the same; the commands are the same or very similar, and even a simple configuration file could be the same. (There are some small incompatibilities.) However, we definitely don't intend to create a fully compatible clone. Right now, only a subset of the command options that tmux provides are supported.
Pymux implements a few improvements over tmux:
There is a completion menu for the command line. (At the bottom of the screen.) The command line has fish-style suggestions. Both Emacs and Vi key bindings for the command line and copy buffer are well developed, thanks to all the effort we have put earlier in prompt_toolkit. Search in the copy buffer is highlighted while searching. Every pane has its own titlebar. When several clients are attached to the same session, each client can watch a different window. When clients are watching different windows, every client uses the full terminal size. Support for 24bit true color. (Disabled by default: not all terminals support it. Use the --truecolor option at startup or during attach in order to enable it.) About the performance:
Tmux is written in C, which is obviously faster than Python. This is noticeable when applications generate a lot of output. Where tmux is able to give fast real-time output for, for instance find / or yes, pymux will process the output slightly slower, and in this case render the output only a few times per second to the terminal. Usually, this should not be an issue. If it is, Pypy should provide a significant speedup. The big advantage of using Python and prompt_toolkit is that the implementation of new features becomes very easy.
[+] [-] bagrow|10 years ago|reply
> The big advantage of using Python and prompt_toolkit is that the implementation of new features becomes very easy.
[+] [-] JulianWasTaken|10 years ago|reply
This is besides the benefit that even though you might not need tmux in Python, having tmux in Python might have created tmux-the-library which someone might later need.
(I haven't yet tried this but I plan on doing so. On an unrelated note, thanks to the author for making this pure Python, and for caveatting "it's not as fast as C" with "but try PyPy").
[+] [-] jodrellblank|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchtbaum|10 years ago|reply