Integrated development environments (IDEs) have been around since the late 80’s in one form or another. While they can be powerful tools, modern IDEs like Visual Studio require gigabytes of RAM to run, and have fancy graphics that make them difficult to use over a remote network connection.
To add to that, many programmers like myself love vi and we find it a sad situation when we can’t use our favorite editor. That’s where the tmux package comes in. Tmux provides a server process that can spawn multiple shells in either windows or panes. This allows you to have multiple vi sessions open, windows to monitor log files, and any other console based applications. You can easily switch between windows using keyboard commands.
Additionally, tmux preserves your sessions, meaning you can log off from your work computer at the end of the day (or if the connection dies) and you can log back in later. All of your session will still be there for you to use.
In this video I give a quick rundown of how to work with tmux.
