tmux/NOTES

Welcome to tmux!

tmux is a "terminal multiplexer", it enables a number of terminals (or windows)
to be accessed and controlled from a single terminal. tmux is intended to be a
simple, modern, BSD-licensed alternative to programs such as GNU screen.

This 0.2 release should be considered a beta release. It runs on OpenBSD,
FreeBSD and Linux, but has many missing features and is expected to have a good
number of bugs.

tmux consists of a server part and multiple clients. The server is created
when required and runs continuously unless killed by the user. Clients access
the server through a socket in /tmp. Multiple sessions may be created on a
single server and attached to a number of clients. Each session may then
have a number of windows and windows may be linked to a number of sessions.
Commands are available to create, rename and destroy windows and sessions; to
attach and detach sessions from client terminals; to set configuration options;
and to bind and unbind command keys (invoked preceded by a prefix key, by
default ctrl-b). Please see the tmux(1) man page for further information.

The following is a summary of major features implemented in this version:

- Basic multiplexing, window switching, attaching and detaching.
- Window listing and renaming.
- Key binding.
- Handling of client terminal resize.
- Terminal emulation sufficient to handle most curses applications. Without
  known issues are: emacs, irssi, mutt, ncmpc (resize problems are present in
  both tmux and screen), vim and various tools and games in the OpenBSD base
  system.
- A optional status line (enabled by default).
- Window history and copy and paste.
- Support for VT100 line drawing characters.
- A basic configuration file.

And major missing features:

- Proper mouse support.
- No support for programs changing termios(4) settings or other tty(4) ioctls.

A more extensive, but rough, todo list is included in the TODO file.

tmux also depends on several features of the client terminal (TERM), if these
are missing it may refuse to run, or not behave correctly. It is possible to
emulate some of these but tmux does not do this at present. Known working are
TERM=screen (tmux in screen), xterm, xterm-color and rxvt. Note that tmux
(and screen) relies on an AX term capability to detect if the terminal
supports "default" (transparent) foreground and background colours. On OpenBSD,
TERM=xterm and TERM=xterm-color lack this; TERM=rxvt does have it and works fine
at least with the aterm and rxvt terminal emulators.

Note that TERM=xterm does not support colour on OpenBSD. screen ignores this,
tmux does not: use xterm-color or rxvt for colour.

There are the following known issues:

- cons25 on the FreeBSD console lies about its support for scroll regions,
  reports are that using TERM=screen pretty much works okay.
- Darwin/OS X's poll(2) is broken and doesn't support polling pty(4)s; as tmux
  makes heavy use of this and there are no suitable alternatives on the
  platform, Darwin and OS X are unfortunately not supported for the present.

For debugging, running tmux with -v or -vv will generate server and client log
files in the current directory.

Bug reports, feature suggestions and especially code contributions are most
welcome. Please email:

	nicm@users.sf.net

-- Nicholas Marriott <nicm@users.sf.net>

$Id: NOTES,v 1.34 2008-06-21 14:11:39 nicm Exp $