A couple weeks ago, I had the idea to build an X11 terminal into tmux. I was unsatisfied with my rxvt fork and wanted a cleaner code base on which to implement new features. Since a majority of my terminals contain tmux windows anyway, I figured it was worth a shot. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, and have made quite a bit of progress on it.
There are a number of advantages to this approach, mainly related to efficiency. It saves a whole layer of control parsing, and tmux already has a lot of the necessary screen buffering built-in, so essentially the display code is just a thin layer to write text to the screen. It also allows for some novel features, like being able to bind a modifier key as prefix (e.g., Alt-m instead of ^A m). There are also disadvantages: it increases the surface area of possible tmux crashes, and we all know how awful they can be. I've tried to make it as robust as possible, but libX11 can make that difficult. Also, it can only implement terminal features tmux supports (e.g., no 24-bit color), and of course is mainly useful locally. I've tried to change the core tmux code as little as possible, and it is completely backwards compatible. However, I have added a couple general tmux features along the way (per-client options, improved mouse copy support). So, I'm looking for feedback, ideas, criticism. It's still quite beta, with a number of missing and under-implemented features, and probably still a few lingering crashes I haven't found yet. However, it's functional enough that I've started using it for daily work. If you want to take a look or even try it out, it's on github (complete with README): https://github.com/dylex/xtmux ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get a FREE DOWNLOAD! and learn more about uberSVN rich system, user administration capabilities and model configuration. Take the hassle out of deploying and managing Subversion and the tools developers use with it. http://p.sf.net/sfu/wandisco-d2d-2 _______________________________________________ tmux-users mailing list tmux-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tmux-users
