Using tmux - sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit GitHub Wiki

One of the more useful tools for use with gentoo is tmux. With gentoo, running updates can take a long time. Being able to leave a console session running without the need to leave putty or a ssh client open can be handy

  • The ability to detach a session and leave something running, then come back to it / reattach later on
  • Vertical scroll of the window with the mouse wheel
  • Split the window vertically or horizontally or both to make you feel like a real hacker
  • Run lots of little process monitoring stuff in the corner, to make you feel elite

There's more details in the official gentoo wiki.

this is just a quick start guide to get up and running as quick as possible.

Installing tmux

First to install tmux

emerge tmux

Next to setup a default configuration

cp /usr/share/doc/tmux-3.1b/example_tmux.conf /etc/tmux.conf

The default config uses Ctrl-A instead of Ctrl-B for tmux which is actually more convenient

Controlling sessions

To setup a new session

tmux

To detach from the session (but leave it running in the background)

  • Press Ctrl-A
  • Press 'd'

To attach to the last session

tmux a

To list all the sessions active

tmux ls

To kill a panel

  • Press Ctrl-A
  • Press 'x'

Copy / paste

In order to use copy paste if you are using putty and the default configuration for tmux. Hold down the shift key and left click to copy / right click to paste. This is the same as what you would normally do for putty with just the addition of the shift key

Split Windows

Splitting the window is pretty easy, tmux provide a right click menu. This can be used to split the window vertically or horizontally. You can also drag the edges of the panel to resize.

Useful console apps

htop

htop should already be installed, it can be used to display general process / cpu info

gotop

gotop is another similar application to htop

layman -a guru
# The double star is due to a missing keyword for arm64
echo "sys-process/gotop **" > /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/gotop
emerge gotop