Over a handful of major courses in college, I spent countless days logged into our central CentOS servers, and while the professors tried their best to teach us cli/tui tools, there was little room or time for picking them up along with the concepts being taught. I forced myself to use vim for those assignments, but without much guidance in how to use it, simply writing and editing programs was quite the hurdle. I remember, somewhat fondly, the monotony of mashing or holding the hjkl keys to crawl around the code I was writing. Now, having been exposed to the greater base of vim/neovim/vi users, I am enthralled with the flow I can achieve in all my types of writing. Throughout this year as I've been on my journey with linux as a daily driver, I have been more fully exploring the gamut of cli software.

Enter TMUX

The tmux terminal multiplexer is a powerful tool. These days, when I spend any decent amount of time on the command line, I am likely to run everything through tmux. Session restoration, copy buffers, and fast pane and window switching make it an indispensable program in my eyes. For all of those reasons, this is something I wish I had known about in college. There's one workflow in particular, though, that I think could have made a huge difference for me.

Session Sharing

Picture yourself at home working Operating Systems coursework. You're working with a partner, and they're asking for some help resolving a build error. It could be something with the linker or something in the make file but they're not sure. Jumping in to help debug, you start asking questions: "What have you tried running?", "Can you try this line {dictating some command}?", "What's in your directories?", etc. You know the steps to take for looking into this, but they're a bit less familiar with the command line. Trying to have them write out the commands you're thinking works okay, but it's a bit slow and sometimes you have to go back over a few times when a command gets mistyped or misinterpreted.

This is the kind of case where leveraging tmux can be invaluable.