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.