Whats wrong with tmux

tmux (and screen before it) are wonderful. They allow me to start a CLI app in a terminal, disconnect from tmux, close the terminal, and reconnect to it again later. Or I can ssh to a remote machine, start tmux and run a critical command without fear of loosing the connection, because I can always ssh in a re-attach if that happens and still see the old “terminal”.

I love that part.

But they really mess with my terminal. On a normal terminal I can scroll up with the mouse or with keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+SHIFT+UP/DOWN/PgUp/PgDown and I can select text with the mouse. But in tmux if I try that it doesn’t work. Instead tmux tries to do something different to achieve the same thing. But I don’t want or like different. Yes, I’ve tried the various workarounds and I hate them. I like my standard terminal’s user interface.

shpool to the rescue

Enter shpool.

$ shpool attach name-of-session

gives me a session (much like tmux did) but the terminal works as normal. I can shpool detach name-of-session from another terminal or hit CTRL+SPACE and then CTRL+Q (without releasing SPACE) to detatch from the current shpool session. While in the session everything works like normal for terminals.

shpool does not provide the window splitting and tiling features that tmux does, but I never used them.

Very happy to have found shpool ❤️.