| Welcome to tmux! |
| |
| tmux is a "terminal multiplexer", it enables a number of terminals (or windows) |
| to be accessed and controlled from a single terminal. tmux is intended to be a |
| simple, modern, BSD-licensed alternative to programs such as GNU screen. |
| |
| This 0.2 release should be considered a beta release. It runs on OpenBSD, |
| FreeBSD and Linux, but has many missing features and is expected to have a good |
| number of bugs. |
| |
| tmux consists of a server part and multiple clients. The server is created |
| when required and runs continuously unless killed by the user. Clients access |
| the server through a socket in /tmp. Multiple sessions may be created on a |
| single server and attached to a number of clients. Each session may then |
| have a number of windows and windows may be linked to a number of sessions. |
| Commands are available to create, rename and destroy windows and sessions; to |
| attach and detach sessions from client terminals; to set configuration options; |
| and to bind and unbind command keys (invoked preceded by a prefix key, by |
| default ctrl-b). Please see the tmux(1) man page for further information. |
| |
| The following is a summary of major features implemented in this version: |
| |
| - Basic multiplexing, window switching, attaching and detaching. |
| - Window listing and renaming. |
| - Key binding. |
| - Handling of client terminal resize. |
| - Terminal emulation sufficient to handle most curses applications. Without |
| known issues are: emacs, irssi, mutt, ncmpc (resize problems are present in |
| both tmux and screen), vim and various tools and games in the OpenBSD base |
| system. |
| - A optional status line (enabled by default). |
| - Window history and copy and paste. |
| - Support for VT100 line drawing characters. |
| - A basic configuration file. |
| |
| And major missing features: |
| |
| - Proper mouse support. |
| - No support for programs changing termios(4) settings or other tty(4) ioctls. |
| |
| A more extensive, but rough, todo list is included in the TODO file. |
| |
| tmux also depends on several features of the client terminal (TERM), if these |
| are missing it may refuse to run, or not behave correctly. It is possible to |
| emulate some of these but tmux does not do this at present. Known working are |
| TERM=screen (tmux in screen), xterm, xterm-color and rxvt. Note that tmux |
| (and screen) relies on an AX term capability to detect if the terminal |
| supports "default" (transparent) foreground and background colours. On OpenBSD, |
| TERM=xterm and TERM=xterm-color lack this; TERM=rxvt does have it and works fine |
| at least with the aterm and rxvt terminal emulators. |
| |
| Note that TERM=xterm does not support colour on OpenBSD. screen ignores this, |
| tmux does not: use xterm-color or rxvt for colour. |
| |
| There are the following known issues: |
| |
| - cons25 on the FreeBSD console doesn't support scroll region (cs) (or lies about |
| support, I'm not totally clear which). This is a pity but emulating cs is non- |
| trivial and as most modern vt220-based software terminals support it currently |
| I have better things to work one. Diffs or ideas how to cleanly emulate cs |
| are welcome. |
| - Darwin/OS X's poll(2) is broken and doesn't support polling pty(4)s; as tmux |
| makes heavy use of this and there are no suitable alternatives on the |
| platform, Darwin and OS X are unfortunately not supported for the present. |
| |
| For debugging, running tmux with -v or -vv will generate server and client log |
| files in the current directory. |
| |
| Bug reports, feature suggestions and especially code contributions are most |
| welcome. Please email: |
| |
| nicm@users.sf.net |
| |
| -- Nicholas Marriott <nicm@users.sf.net> |
| |
| $Id: NOTES,v 1.35 2008-06-25 19:12:30 nicm Exp $ |