I assumed they meant “lightweight” in the sense that tmux can take quite a bit of setup and practice to get comfortable in, when using for the very first time.
I love tmux but it’s definitely not “n00b” friendly.
Window management, mouse support, key bindings (I really dislike the defaults for a few of them), selection/copy/paste, macros etc
All stuff that doesn’t need to be configured but if you look at any tmux tutorial you’ll see boat loads of details about. Which can be confusing because how do you know if you don’t need to know it?
Also what’s the basics for one person isn’t going to be the basics for another. Eg I rarely use the detach capabilities these days whereas the panes and windows are something I do use lots.
My point is this: tmux is sufficiently complicated that a complete beginner might not know what features they need to learn.
tmux takes over scrollback, so it's not possible to scroll the buffer in the same way as without tmux. This tool seems to solve the problem more elegantly.
That gets you scrolling, yes, but not in the same way as without tmux.
Without tmux, your terminal emulator uses its scroll-back buffer to render as you scroll, not requiring any intermediate copies of the lines of text scrolling into view.
With tmux, your terminal emulator no longer handles that, and instead tmux must pass a copy of each line freshly scrolled into view to the terminal emulator, which involves an intermediate copy of that text and re-triggers the terminal emulator’s parsing (as far as your terminal emulator is concerned, it has never seen this line of text yet). All of that (and some other subtle overhead I’m not mentioning here) are completely avoided outside of tmux (or more specifically: whenever the terminal emulator is free to manage its own scroll-back).
tmux does support scrolling and copy-paste, but they often work subtly differently than the way they do in a native terminal. For example, when I try putting `set -g mouse on` in `~/.tmux.conf`, scrolling mostly works fine but if I scroll up and then start typing or press up, I won't jump right to the bottom of the session the way I'm used to in native Alacritty (which I will often do as a way to return after scrolling back through a bunch of print output). This isn't a huge deal, and you can definitely get used to it, but it can be frustrating if you like how your normal terminal emulator works and don't want it to change.
This is kind of a strange comment to leave to the author of the tool that's being compared...
Obviously "nothing in life is free" - the person you're replying to literally spent a bunch of time writing a solution to their problem.
"what do you expect?" - the person literally wrote what they expected after having written the code to do exactly that. OP has been all over this thread being incredibly diplomatic in both explaining why they wrote a replacement for (part of) tmux, and constantly following it up with "but by all means if that doesn't sound right to you, use tmux it's a great tool".
It feels a lot like "well, if you don't like it go do it yourself", which is deeply ironic.
Yeah that's a good point, "lightweight" was probably not the best term. I meant lightweight in terms of the cognitive overhead of picking up a new tool, not really in terms of performance. I would expect that shpool will perform better on some workloads and tmux will perform better on others (though in both cases they are probably good enough).
The main difference is that tmux is a power user tool that you generally invest in configuring and tweaking to get just right, while shpool is meant to be set up quickly to solve the specific problem of dropped connections and then mostly forgotten about.
Interesting thanks. I interpreted "lightweight" to mean available features. i.e. just the persistent connection, none of the other bloat[1].
[1]: to be clear, I don't mean "bloat" in a negative way. I'm a long time tmux user and I love it, absolutely love it, and won't be giving it up anytime soon. I don't personally think it has any bloat. But, I use the features. If one only wanted persistent connections, then all of tmux is quite a bit of bloat. It's all perspective.
it simply allows you to have multiple shell/term sessions on a server and be able to switch between them from any terminal. Kind of a 'flat ctrl-Z' cum 'nohup' if you will.
No windows, splits, etc, no client software at all in fact.
