In my scenario, I have to work on several tabs and splits for one topic/work (say it's Python work), and I usually have 2-3 topics in a day (office related, playing around, and maybe side-project stuff). I'm using tmux, and I tend to have 2-3 tabs for each topic, using only tmux to manage them is painful and ugly: there's too many tabs in the current display, and the default gnome terminal doesn't mix with the looks of everything else. So I'm using urxvt to manage the tabs, it's fast (sometimes I love verbosity), it can handle tabs beautifully, highly customizable, and the default shortcuts are good.
I'm wondering that too. Tmux enables a hell of a lot more than just panes/windows, and looks pretty spiffy while doing it I think. A terminal with no menubars or chrome with tmux inside it is the most elegant, adaptable, and capable configuration I've ever had the pleasure to use.
If say I have 2 topics with 3 tabs each, and I want to switch to different topic, I need to move to the 4th tab either by switching tab few times, or knowing the index of the tab to get a faster shortcut. Both, in my opinion, are not simple.
If I combine tmux with urxvt, I can have 3 tmux tabs in a urxvt tab, and another 3 tmux tabs in second urxvt tab, and I can switch context just by pressit shift+left/right, I can also easily realign context with ctrl+left/right.
tmux is awesome, but in my case, it's not so awesome when I have to handle many tabs with totally different context, which is why I combined it with urxvt.
> If I combine tmux with urxvt, I can have 3 tmux tabs in a urxvt tab, and another 3 tmux tabs in second urxvt tab, and I can switch context just by pressit shift+left/right, I can also easily realign context with ctrl+left/right.
I see what you mean. Generally I open a new urxvt/terminator for a new grouping. A rails project is in its own terminal, a django project in another.
> I need to move to the 4th tab either by switching tab few times, or knowing the index of the tab to get a faster shortcut. Both, in my opinion, are not simple.
I have this in my conf:
unbind '"'
bind '"' choose-window
I generally have more than 10 tmux windows open. Either I know which index is which(rails project - 0 is vim, 1 is server, 2 is console, 3 is dbconsole, 4 is tail logs, 5 is for running tests...), or I select the windows. Switching tabs few times isn't an ideal way to switch to the desired window.
> which is why I combined it with urxvt.
urxvt has tabs? Mine doesn't. Anyway I have moved to terminator. I find it easier to configure(the pains I took to configure urxvt for copy-paste), performant and standard compliant.
tmux turns scrollback from "pretty simple" on a stock xterm or other terminal, to "absolute goddamn bullshit". That, combined with the fact that I quite like using "^b" to move my cursor around, means I don't use tmux as much as I possibly should. Yes, I know I could fix the ^b problem in a config file, but as I've said elsewhere, I work on about 6 different machines on a regular basis and don't have the patience to mess around syncing my configs.
> tmux turns scrollback from "pretty simple" on a stock xterm or other terminal, to "absolute goddamn bullshit"
tmux(and screen) scrollback is absolutely fantastic. Navigate with keyboard(and not just page-up page-down), have vim or emacs bindings, search backward...
> I work on about 6 different machines on a regular basis and don't have the patience to mess around syncing my configs.
As I said elsewhere, it takes about 2 minutes to copy ssh keys and scp dotfiles.
