tmux, vim and zsh

It’s been about two years since I started working at Salesforce.com. It’s been an eventful two years. There are plenty of interesting and challenging problems to work on. And we have a good set of internal tools that we use to get our stuff down.

We work using a variety of different languages with a very large code base. And, most of the time, the three tools that I have found indispensable are tmux (or your favorite terminal multiplexer), vim (or your favorite terminal editor) and zsh (with the oh-my-zsh plug-ins).

In fact, I would say that these three tools, when adequately configured, are the most useful things that one can have in their repertoire of developer tools. They work almost everywhere – this is very important when you are not sure which machine you need to be working on locally or remotely. They are good are what they do – handling everything from the simple cases to the more complex ones where loading full fledge GUI application through the internet is just not feasible.

So if you have any time at all, I think it is a good investment to start learning how to use these tools. I started off during my years at the university. The initial learning curve might be steep but you can always start small and move on from there. All of these tools that I will be talking about are easily configured. To get you started, I’ve shared my configuration files in my dotfiles repository on Github.

Let’s start with the most essential, tmux.

tmux

tmux is a terminal multiplexer.

It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal.

Why is this useful?

Everyday, I get to my office, open the terminal at my workstation and hack away. I open several programs in the terminal – usually a combination of vim, perforce, etc. I do my work and go home. Sometimes, at home I would like to reconnect to my workstation and continue working from home. tmux lets me reattach to the same terminal at my workstation so I get the same opened programs. So I can manipulate all my opened programs easily.

When I am done at home, I just detach tmux and I can reattach it again the next day at the office.

This is not limited to working at the office and at home. I can reconnect to a terminal on a remote machine from any other terminal and have access to all my programs and the state that they were in.

As a bonus, because I can multiplex between different programs from a single terminal, I eliminate the need to open multiple terminal windows. Opening multiple terminal windows for each new program gets unwieldy pretty quickly. How often do you see your co-workers desktops littered with a ton of open terminal windows without a clear way to identify the right one quickly?

There is at least one other alternative to tmux: screen which has been around for a longer time. It is worth learning simply for the fact that you can count on it being installed on most systems whereas you would probably need to install tmux on your own.

Regardless of which one you choose to learn, being able to use at least one terminal multiplexer is a good investment especially if you frequently use different machines to work on. I would recommend reading Pragmatic Tmux to get up to speed quickly on tmux. Here’s a video of the author, Brian Hogan, promoting the usefulness of tmux:

vim

I’m not going to turn this into a vim vs emacs post (though check out spacemacs) so you can just pick whichever text editor you are comfortable with. In fact, if you prefer to use nano or pico, that is probably fine too. You just need to be able to use a terminal-based (not GUI-based) editor fairly well.

I am not bashing full-featured text editors such as TextMate or its, now-more-sexy counterpart, Sublime Text. Those GUI editors are wonderful and I use them too. However, sometimes you just don’t have the luxury of installing and configuring a GUI-based too. What if the computer you are trying to connect to doesn’t allow to load a UI instance? You need some fallback plan.

vim (and other venerable text editors) are almost always around on any *nix based machines. Therefore you can always rely on them on remote machines especially when you are trying to edit some configuration file.

Another advantage that I have found with such editors is that they are really fast compared to full IDEs. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think IDEs are indispensable (heck, I worked on creating useful tools that plug into Eclipse as part of my PhD). However, sometimes they can be just too slow. And for dynamic languages such as JavaScript, current IDEs do not offer any advantage over a well-configured text editor. The usual features that IDEs have for statically-typed languages such as Java or C# – code completion, call hierarchy, find all references, etc – are not available for JavaScript meaning that you are pretty much left with regular expression search.

zsh

Here are my favorite zsh features:

• Easily themeable prompts. I configured it to show git status so I can tell at a glance whether I have a dirty local git repository. For a detailed article on how to customize your zsh prompt, take a look at this guide by Steve Losh.
• Auto-completion on steroids. Whenver you need to get into /myDirectory/with/a/long/name, you can easily just type /m/w/a/l/n, hit tab and choose from the different completions.
• Sharing of a command history buffer across all shells. At the beginning of this article, I wrote that I use tmux. Well, with tmux, I open multiple windows and each window is a zsh shell. It sure is nice if whatever command I typed into each window can also be searched and recalled in another window. With zsh, that’s possible — I have never figured out how to do that reliably with bash.

I am sure that you can configure bash to do most of the things mentioned above. However, zsh with the oh-my-zsh plug-ins makes it much simpler and has a vibrant community to bout. For instance, when I ran into issues using the up arrow on Mac OS X Mavericks, I found the solution at this link.

Conclusion

There you have it, my trio of tools that are indispensable to my daily tasks. I have been using them since graduate school and I continue using them everyday. So I think my investment paid off (and will continue to do so). Hope you pick up some of those tools. Or if you have any other suggestions, feel free to comment below.