I’ve used GNU screen since 1994 to keep multiple terminals open and active on remote servers. Whew. That’s a lot of my life to be mucking about terminal windows. The longevity of that run should say good things about the people behind screen. But about 6 months ago at RubyConf i was convinced to try out tmux (terminal multiplexer). It’s a more flexible, more scriptable cousin of screen. You have the ability to divide space into multiple tiled panes so that you can have a code and result window on the same screen, you can attach multiple clients without the fragility screen has in this area, etc.

As some of my regular readers may have noticed I have moved my blog to using Octopress. How this happened was a bit of an accident that emerged from a yak shave this weekend. I had been wanting to get a VPS solution where I could use tmux and vim to host remote programming tasks.1 I had been kicking around the idea of getting off of my Wordpress blog and moving to a site whose content was statically generated (like Jekyll). The advantage of using dynamically-generated static sites is that they are not subject to cratering under heavy load thanks to no dependence on a database.

In a recent disscussion the developer community “The Practical Dev” asked how we, as developers, keep track of what we’re working on so we remember where to start next time. Many of the respondents had advice about time tracking or to-do lists. I read the question as a question about technology and less about process. My answer was that: Tmux + doing my work on my @digitalocean droplet creates great continuity in process for me. I rarely break the context (~years). I’ve been working in this development “style” for many years now and I thought refresh some of the core ideas.