… You might not need tmux!

Stats

Background

Well for a long time, I have been using tmux for session persistence and window management in the terminal. I a new terminal multiplexer that promises to be more user-friendly and feature-rich than tmux . I decided to give it a try and see how it compares to Byobu.

Byobu

.

For those of you who haven’t played with Byobu, it’s based off of tmux and provides a more user-friendly interface with additional features. The keybindings make a lot more sense to me. Ctrl+A -> D to detach, F2 for new Window. My fingers can actually hit the damn buttons

One of the big reasons for even going down this rabbit hole was needing to keep ssh sessions open in the background. Yeah I know Ctrl+Z and fg/bg DO work, but I wanted somthing BETTER…

Zellij

So I DID end up finding Zellij after asking a SlackWare work friend… OH MAN, I could write a whole review on this one as well… man, if TMUX was even EASIER, like Byobu, but even NICER!

ZMX

ZMX hits the sweet spot between the simplicity of byobu and the power of tmux. If you’re looking for a modern, privacy‑first way to keep terminal work alive across reboots, ZMX is the tool to try today.

I did find two nice options for just running commands in the background. Both are nice, but not quite robust enough for running apps in the background, interactivly.

• https://github.com/dunstorm/pm2-go

• https://github.com/Nukesor/pueue

  

The issue with these two is that I wanted to be able to pop back into the shell and see what was running, not quite systemD, but not the PITA of Docker Exec…

Verdict

TLDR, this app hits a great sweet spot between all the above for long running scripts / CLI apps.

5/5

Download

💾 https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx/releases 💾

# Install (macOS / Linux via Homebrew)
brew install neurosnap/tap/zmx

# Or grab a pre‑built binary
curl https://zyedidia.github.io/eget.sh | sh
eget https://zmx.sh/a/zmx-0.6.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Other reviews

Zmx Ai Portal

This article is a part of the series "reviews".

Other articles in the series:

• Review - Superfile (Created by yorukot) 1 min read
• Review - LazyGit (created by jesseduffield) 2 min read
• Review - GDU (Created by dundee) 2 min read
• Review - Doggo (Created by mr-karan) 1 min read
• Review - AI Tooling 4 min read
• Review - Heynote (Created by Jonatan Heyman) 2 min read
• Review - ZMX (Created by Jonatan Heyman) 2 min read
• How to setup ZSH LLM Autocomplete 6 min read