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Getting Hip to Tmux
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This article almost feels overdue, but honestly already using a tiling WM made putting off learning/using Tmux pretty easy but use cases kept popping up, mainly when I'm learning coding on my laptop. I usually default to my study screen being half one terminal window running Zathura with whatever book that I'm currently studying from, and the other half is a terminal window that pretty much perpetually stays in Neovim, and I'd occasionally either switch to another screen or pop open another terminal window for debugging or some other random terminal task, then immediately close it out to give nvim the space that it needs. But the thought kept creeping into my head: debugging would be so much more efficient of I could just tab my my terminal window out of Neovim, and have a a regular shell to debug in, and then another one with python3 open for calculations and whatnot. I shrugged it off for a few weeks but the thought kept eating at me more and more until I finally broke. I didn't do much configuration, since my use-case is pretty slim in scope as Qtile takes care of any desire for me to multiplex windows, so I just focused on what I wanted out of it, which was a terminal-tab system that was convenient and worked. My first step was to change the horrid Ctrl-B prefix key to something that doesn't feel like I'm going to rip my hand apart if I do it enough, and settled on Ctrl-F for comfort, then my only other immediate qualm was that the first window was 0, then went to 1 (which, yeah CompSci, I get it) but does not make for an effective workflow (in my particular case) so I set the pane-base-index to 1. That way I can make fast left-handed movements to move through my terminal tabs as needed without any mental overhead (which was the goal.) I might get into a more mature Tmux configuration and utilize some plugins in the future, but for the time being, the thing does exactly what I want it to and I'm very happy with it.
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