TMUX

I've been very reluctant to use any kind of terminal multiplexer for years now, I have no good reason for this reluctance, I guess I just get stuck in my way. I really have no problem with multiple xterm/putty windows open side by side -- definitely makes copying and pasting easier and more efficient.

I made the decision about 12 months ago, probably more out of boredom than anything, to join my co-workers and give 'screen' a shot. Screen is a very nice application and a lot of thought has been put into it over the years. I really got used to the window splitting, copy buffers, dettaching and reattaching features-- really makes life easy when you have to deal with flaky connections and a forever dropping out citrix server.

More to the point, I could leave connections to servers open for days or even weeks and not have to re-authenticate -- here's my laziness showing through again.

After a few months using screen, a few friends of mine had suggested 'tmux'. I wasn't overly interested, screen did what I wanted but hey, a change is like a holiday, right?

I installed tmux on both Solaris and FreeBSD ( my two favourite systems ) and it seemed much the same as screen. A few things were a little different - attaching, the escape character, a few commands -- but all in all, it was the same thing. There was, however, one feature that really stood out to me and that was the way in which it re-attached to my previous session.
When I used split panes in screen, I was never able to resume this same setup however, tmux allows this.
ie. If you split panes, move panes, break panes etc. It's going to look exactly the same when you reattach to that session as it did before -- it's a very helpful feature when you have 10 panes open and each horizontally split.

I have been using tmux now for about six months and although it's still lacking a few features, it's advancing quite rapidly and I highly suggest giving it a go.