Tag Archives: mutt

Learning tmux

I’ve been experimenting with tmux the last couple of weeks, using it as a combination drop-in for screen, and for terminal multiplexing all the CLI programs I am also experimenting with as replacements for their GUI equivalents (more on this later).

Terminal multiplexing at its simplest is creating several “windows” in a terminal window, each of which may have several “panes.” You can get a sense of it in the screenshot above.

Anyhow, I’ve been enjoying tmux very much and will likely be sharing more on it at a later date. For now, I wanted to pass along a resource from the awesomely named blog, Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots: “A Tmux Crash Course”.

I’ve been using Tmux for about six months now and it has become just as essential to my workflow as vim. Pane and window management, copy-mode for navigating output, and session management make it a no-brainer for those who live in the terminal (and especially vim). I’ve compiled a list of tmux commands I use daily to help me work more efficiently.

Man after my own heart. :)

UPDATE 5 JUL 2011

Here’s also a “TMUX Terminal Multiplexer Tutorial” from Jeff Story of Jeff’s Home Served Linux Powered Blog.

For the curious, the programs listed along the bottom of the screen are:

  1. Mutt – email
  2. Newsbeuter – rss feed reader
  3. Taskwarrior – project management
  4. “Journal” is actually a Vim (text editor) session editing a Zim (desktop GUI wiki) document.
  5. ELinks – web browser

Mmmmm… mutt

I have had occasion in the past to fall in love with the CLI email client “mutt” — last year, in fact, it wound up being a great resource while I made various server consolidation and administration moves and was spending a lot of time in term windows.

There are several guides out there for setting up mutt, but it’s always nice to find a newly updated one with the latest info. Via an article on macosxhints comes this great linsec.ca guide: “Using mutt on OS X” by vdanen. He covers everything from installation, building/compiling, and the usual setup stuff, then moves on to what have been deal-killers for folks in the past — Address Book integration, attachment handling, improved threading, and other coolness. Definitely recommended.

Myself, I’m holding out to see how Leopard’s improvements work out. “Stationery” and a “media browser” don’t bode well. ;) Notes and to-dos are intriguing, however.