Preface

Why This Book?

I wasn’t going to write a tmux book. I never meant to start writing technical books in the first place. But a number of readers of Painless Vim asked if I would be writing another tech book, and if I did could I please make it about tmux?

Which felt like a weird request at first. But it makes sense. If you’re using vim you’re already (probably) in a terminal, and if you’re editing text or code with all these keyboard shortcuts why don’t we take it one step further and make it so you can do everything with awesome keyboard shortcuts?

So here we are. A book about tmux. And honestly, I’m pretty excited. Because Painless Vim was hard to write, for a couple of reasons:

• I was new to vim
• I was new to writing tech books
• Vim is a challenging topic

Painless Tmux is completely different: I’ve been using Tmux for over a year, and consider it a mainstay of my daily routine. I know exactly what I want to show you, and I’m confident that I can get you to a stable, productive and honestly amazing tmux workflow without too much hassle. So, let’s get right into it!