prompt-toolkit / pymux

A terminal multiplexer (like tmux) in Python
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Pymux

WARNING: This project requires maintenance. The current master branch requires an old version of both prompt_toolkit and ptterm. There is a prompt-toolkit-3.0 branch here that is compatible with the latest prompt_toolkit and the latest commit of the master branch of ptterm, but for that branch, only pymux standalone is working at the moment.

A terminal multiplexer (like tmux) in Python

::

pip install pymux

.. image :: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathanslenders/pymux/master/images/pymux.png

Issues, questions, wishes, comments, feedback, remarks? Please create a GitHub issue, I appreciate it.

Installation

Simply install pymux using pip:

::

pip install pymux

Start it by typing pymux.

What does it do?

A terminal multiplexer makes it possible to run multiple applications in the same terminal. It does this by emulating a vt100 terminal for each application. There are serveral programs doing this. The most famous are GNU Screen <https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/> and tmux <https://tmux.github.io/>.

Pymux is written entirely in Python. It doesn't need any C extension. It runs on all Python versions from 2.6 until 3.5. It should work on OS X and Linux.

Compared to tmux

To some extent, pymux is a clone of tmux. This means that all the default shortcuts are the same; the commands are the same or very similar, and even a simple configuration file could be the same. (There are some small incompatibilities.) However, we definitely don't intend to create a fully compatible clone. Right now, only a subset of the command options that tmux provides are supported.

Pymux implements a few improvements over tmux:

About the performance:

The big advantage of using Python and prompt_toolkit <https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt-toolkit>_ is that the implementation of new features becomes very easy.

More screenshots

24 bit color support and the autocompletion menu:

.. image :: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathanslenders/pymux/master/images/menu-true-color.png

What happens if another client with a smaller screen size attaches:

.. image :: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathanslenders/pymux/master/images/multiple-clients.png

When a pane enters copy mode, search results are highlighted:

.. image :: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jonathanslenders/pymux/master/images/copy-mode.png

Why create a tmux clone?

For several reasons. Having a terminal multiplexer in Python makes it easy to experiment and implement new features. While C is a good language, it's not as easy to develop as Python.

Just like pyvim <https://github.com/jonathanslenders/pyvim>_ (A Vi clone in Python.), it started as another experiment. A project to challenge the design of prompt_toolkit. At this point, however, pymux should be stable and usable for daily work.

The development resulted in many improvements in prompt_toolkit, especially performance improvements, but also some functionality improvements.

Further, the development is especially interesting, because it touches so many different areas that are unknown to most Python developers. It also proves that Python is a good tool to create terminal applications.

The roadmap

There is no official roadmap, the code is mostly written for the fun and of course, time is limited, but I use pymux professionally and I'm eager to implement new ideas.

Some ideas:

Configuring

Create a file ~/.pymux.conf, and populate it with commands, like you can enter at the command line. There is an example config <https://github.com/jonathanslenders/pymux/blob/master/examples/example-config.conf>_ in the examples directory.

What if it crashes?

If for some reason pymux crashes, it will attempt to write a stack trace to a file with a name like /tmp/pymux.crash-*. It is possible that the user interface freezes. Please create a GitHub issue with this stack trace.

Special thanks