In the old days you had a big ol’ green screen on your desk with a big ol’ clicky keyboard. You typed in a command, that command got sent to a mainframe somewhere and the screen showed you what happened and we called it high tech. Now we all have these multi-core computing beasts on our desks, systems capable of running literally billions of instructions in the time it takes you to blink, but for some reason we’re still treating the command line like a green screen dumb terminal that can only handle one command at a time.

That’s no way to live. Except for the clicky keyboard part. Mechanical keyboards are awesome. But that’s not the point.

Enter tmux. Tmux is a way to get more out of your terminal emulator. Open multiple windows on one screen, and multiple tabs in a single session to have instant access to every aspect of your work all from a single terminal window. While you’re at it you can open up multiple sessions on a single machine, or connect to remote sessions…in short, tmux is your gateway to the matrix. Glowy green letters everywhere! (if that’s your idea of a cool color scheme. I’m not here to judge.)Painless Tmux starts with the understanding that you're an intelligent, busy person who has to get actual work done along with learning to wrangle multiple command lines. This book is designed to help you get comfortable with tmux incrementally, helping you build up the kind of skill you need to fully utilize panes, windows, sessions and all the other power features of tmux. The goal is to introduce you to the 20% of tmux that you'll use most often first, and give you pointers to the 80% you'll use less often when you're ready to explore. Painless Tmux is also designed to be short, easy to read, and inexpensive, so you can learn quickly and painlessly. I think you'll like this book, and I think that before too long you'll find that using tmux is actually fun and that learning it was, well, painless.