tmux vs. screen

To the anonymous commenter who asked why I, a dyed in the wool OpenBSD lover, would choose GNU screen over the built-in tmux:

I'd never heard of such a thing. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

I've been using GNU screen since my early Linux consulting days. 2005? Maybe 2006. It was installed by default on most of the common distros of the time and came in uproariously handy when running long-running processes on shaky connections, when the customer's machine was dodgy.

I don't use GNU screen so much as my fingers do.

Now that's not to say I refuse to learn new tricks. I tried out tmux, and I'll be honest. It needs some work. The resource utilization appears to be higher in my highly unscientific comparisons, but I haven't tried scaling it to dozens and dozens of windows. I dig that tmux has the Emacsian ability to split the screen into two windows, over-under, and I can keep that on a single quote-unquote tab.

tmux has a nice client-server setup, but I have yet to find a way to get the tmux server component to stay in the foreground. This makes it unsuitable for my favorite brand of active process supervision. I've also got a problem with its built-in UTF8 support: -u from the command line is fine, but setting the documented UTF8 flags in the .tmux.conf file doesn't yield the same behavior.

I'm sure there are solutions to these problems, but it requires a bit more TLC straight out of the box than GNU screen did when I first started using it.