How Pivotal Labs use Tmux for remote pair programming

I'm going to once again praise the Pragmatic Programmers tmux book by Brian Hogan[1]. It's an absolutely amazing book. Short enough to make it a quick read, but filled with everything you could possibly need. It gets right into the meat and potatoes and by the end of the first chapter, you can be using tmux effectively.<p>I highly recommend the book. Absolutely love it.<p>[1] <a href="http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux" rel="nofollow">http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux</a>

If any screen folks are trying out tmux, here is my .tmux.conf assembled to have screen like bindings.<p><a href="https://github.com/rahulkmr/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rahulkmr/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf</a><p>C-a c new window<p>C-a | vertical split<p>C-a S horizontal split<p>etc etc.<p>As far as copy paste goes, I use this <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tmux#ICCCM_Selection_Integration" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tmux#ICCCM_Selection_In...</a> C-a C-c copies tmux buffer to clipboard, C-a C-v sets tmux buffer to clipboard and pastes it(it's already in the configs; just putting it here).<p>As far as terminal emulators go, I have tried out a lot of them(gnome-terminal, konsole, urxvt, xterm) and finally settled on terminator. gnome-terminal will keep messing with my readline settings(alt opens up the menu), urxvt won't let me copy-paste the clipboard...Terminator is no frills - you can graphically set the preferences, or have a config file; it lets you copy paste to and from the clipboard; you can configure it to copy the x-selection to clipboard(middle click to paste - just not it). For anyone looking for a terminal emulator on linux(or whatever other platforms it runs on), I highly recommend it.

GNU Screen <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/</a> also supports multiple users per session, so you can use it for remote pair programming as well. I believe it supports most of the same things as tmux except the vertical splits (although I seem to remember there being a patch to add that). I'm not advocating one over the other, I'm just a long-time, happy screen user who's never taken the time to investigate tmux.

just in case anyone isn't aware of it, wemux <a href="https://github.com/zolrath/wemux/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zolrath/wemux/</a> makes paired programming very easy to setup for tmux, many of the 'issues' discussed are also pretty solvable with a bit of googling..<p>there's various different work arounds.. a recent one I came across was to make sure your vim is compiled with +xterm_clipboard and +clipboard.. then doing "r+ allows you to paste directly from your clipboard using vim rather than relying on whatever your terminal emulator gets up to..<p>vim --version | grep clipboard to check how your vim was compiled<p>also, adding the following to ~/.tmux.conf is useful<p>--------------<p>#copy tmux paste buffer to clipboard<p>bind C-c run "tmux show-buffer | xclip -i -selection clipboard"<p>#copy clipboard to tmux paste buffer and paste tmux paste buffer<p>bind C-v run "tmux set-buffer --- \"$(xclip -o -selection clipboard)\"; tmux paste-buffer"

I find this very interesting - having paired quite a bit with the Boulder office, none of them would have ever <i>considered</i> this setup. They where all Rubymine or GTFO...

I have also found screen sharing to be way too slow for remote pairing. A good bit of our development is in Visual Studio, though, and I haven't found a good way to remotely share an editor session other than screen share. For our Python/Ruby work I'll definitely try this out, though.

For anyone using Komodo, it has a similar feature that allows two people to have the same file open for editing at the same time. It works across servers (using smb) pretty well, but that probably depends on your network speed.

tmux + iTerm2 are the best things ever (except for the copy/paste issues).