Ubuntu – How to get byobu to launch tmux instead of screen

byobutmux

The latest versions of byobu should apparently be configurable to run tmux instead of screen, but I haven't been able to.
Advice appreciated

Best Answer

Byobu 5.x has excellent support for tmux. New installations of Byobu 5.x and above will default to using tmux as the backend. Upgrades from older versions, however, will not automatically make that switch.

Still, you can manually run byobu with tmux by typing byobu-tmux. Similarly, you can manually choose to run with the screen backend by typing byobu-screen.

Running byobu will launch with your selected default backend. You can choose between tmux and screen by running byobu-select-backend.

kirkland@ubuntu:~$ byobu-select-backend 

Select the byobu backend:
  1. tmux
  2. screen

Choose 1-2 [1]: 1

Related Solutions

Byobu F-Keys – How to Make F-Keys Work in Byobu for Midnight Commander, Htop, etc.

You can easily toggle on/off the use of the F-keys inside of Byobu (tmux) by pressing either:

shift-F12 (in tmux)
ctrl-a-! (in screen)

Full disclosure: I'm the author and maintainer of Byobu.

Byobu – Use Multiple Byobu Sessions While Ignoring Unrelated Tmux Sessions

The tmux program is designed to be run as a single server process that manages one or more independent sessions. The configuration file is loaded by the server process when it starts and is applied to new sessions when they are created. Running tmux new-session (or, equivalently in this case, byobu new-session) contacts the running server if there is one, and requests that it create a new session. The server uses a known path for its socket based only on the UID of the user, and that is all that is needed to connect to a running tmux server. So this is why if a "normal" tmux session is already running, byobu will either attach to or create a new session using that server.

According to the tmux man page, you can simply change the socket used by tmux to start two independent tmux servers, each with their own sets of configuration if desired. You can either specify -L to change the base name of the socket or the -S option to specify a completely different path to the socket file. The default tmux socket is named default.

So, using these tmux options when calling byobu, to start an independent tmux server with byobu, you can run

byobu -L my-byobu new

byobu -L my-byobu attach

where the name my-byobu can be replaced with any name of your choice. This starts a new tmux server with the name my-byobu, which loads the byobu configuration for tmux instead of the default, and effectively creates an independent namespace for your byobu tmux sessions.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Byobu F-Keys – How to Make F-Keys Work in Byobu for Midnight Commander, Htop, etc.

Byobu – Use Multiple Byobu Sessions While Ignoring Unrelated Tmux Sessions

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