[jrop]

I do indeed live in the terminal (all day due to work), but tmux adds too much value for me to do all terminal management in Neovim (tmux session-management being what I use most). I've just encountered too many visual "glitches" in the Neovim terminal to rely on it for everything. That's not to say, however, that I never use the built-in Neovim :terminal.

> I thought it might be easier to only ever have one buffer open for a given file, instead of attempting to open a file in a given pane only to realize that it's already open in a different neovim instance

This is not a problem in my config:

    vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ 'FocusGained', 'BufEnter', 'CursorHold' }, {
      pattern = '\*',
      command = 'silent! checktime',
    })

Since `'autoread'` is by default `on` in Neovim, this seamlessly reloads the buffer if the underlying file has been updated on disk.

[khamidou]

I'd be curious to hear more about how tmux helps you — I tried it and besides keeping a permanent session open on a remote server to me I didn't find much use for it compared to regular terminal tabs

[jrop]

I use it daily locally, and find it amusing how many only think of it as being useful on remote servers (not to invalidate your use-case -- I'm just contrasting my own use). As a precursor, I view UNIX as my IDE, of which tmux is a part: this IDE runs on Windows (WSL2), macOS, Linux, and Android (Termux). That aside, here are a few reasons I find tmux to be useful in this concoction of tools:

- Session management. I've written custom scripts for myself around this (zoxide + fzf). If you want to see how this can be used, look at ThePrimagen's workflow. I don't use his scripts but he has a good demo of how he harnesses sessions.

- Unified scrollback management - easily search the scrollback, yank it, etc. My favorite thing to do is to yank part of the scrollback, then `Prefix+B,=` to list everything I've yanked (think of this like a "clipboard manager" specific to tmux), select an entry, and press `e` to edit it in `$EDITOR`.

- This one might be a stretch, but I tend to try and use only terminal tools (without being utterly insane) because then tmux can be my "tiling window manager" no matter what OS I'm on. Oh, I have to use Windows for work? Not to worry, tmux runs in WSL2, as do most of my preferred tools, so I feel mostly at home even though I normally really dislike Windows.

- It's scriptable. Read `man tmux` and use your imagination!

Notwithstanding any of that, there are cons, the most apparent one being that I am limited to text-based tools this way. An example of this: getting images to work in tmux, though many modern terminal emulators support them, is a huge pane, so I haven't bothered.

[jez]

I think my problem is when I realize that I had unsaved changes open in a different neovim instance. If the file was not dirty in any other open neovim instances then I don't have the same problem.