Replacing window(1) with tmux

[Roy Marples <roy%marples.name@localhost>]

Hi List!

There was some discussion off-list recently about tmux. For those that 
haven't heard of it, it's a BSD licensed screen on steroids. I myself 
only heard of it yesterday so I don't know all the features it has over 
screen, but one very useful allowing tabbed sessions in a single 
terminal. I also find it easier to use than screen for scrolling, which 
aside from detaching, is the main use I have for things like this.

So we currently have window(1) which I have tried to use, but it lacks 
the important detach feature so I have as such discarded it.

It looks like OpenBSD and FreeBSD have imported tmux into their base 
systems and the upstream dev has become an OpenBSD dev and the code is 
quite easy to follow so I suggest we import it to.

The only issue is that tmux currently requires ncurses, but it only uses 
it for obtaining terminal capabilities. I've prepared a small patch to 
convert it to using termcap instead that applies againts pkgsrc -current 
here [1]. I've sent a similar patch upstream.

As I'm a relatively new tmux user and I don't really use advanved 
features of screen, I'll leave it to others to say if what the pros of 
tmux vs screen are, but one pro or tmux is that I can read the 
documentation and source a lot easier than screen!

So I propose that once my patch is accepted upstream (or some form of it 
so that ncurses is not required) then we import it and remove window(1).

Discuss!

Thanks

Roy

[1] http://www.netbsd.org/~roy/tmux-termcap.diff