Extending tmux with multi-server support?

[Merijn Verstraaten]

Ola,

One of my age long pet peeves has been the poor integration between my local tmux environment and tmux sessions running on servers, such as having no shared clipboard, the annoyance of needing to different prefixes for nested sessions, etc.

Recently I've been thinking a bit about how to fix this in a satisfactory way. An obvious solution (to my naïve eyes) seems to be to allow a tmux-client to connect to multiple servers. Allowing the user to list the sessions of *all* connected clients and select them.

From a user-perspective I would want "tmux choose-tree" to list all sessions from all servers (labeled with the relevant server) and all their windows and transparently switch between them. I'd want to have access to the same copy/paste buffers.

Potential problems I see:
- Windows can be shared between sessions, but it makes no sense to share windows between sessions on different machines.
- Are copy/paste buffers currently per client, per session or per server? If the latter two, the client needs to somehow unify these multiple sets of buffers

This email is mostly meant to ask for opinions/sanity check before I sink any non-trivial amount of time into exploring the code/hacking. Is this a stupid idea? Is the idea ok, but does it not fit the current tmux design without a lot of work? Any problems I missed? Suggestions for resolving the above mentioned problems? Any odds of working code for this getting merged back into tmux?

Cheers,
Merijn
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[Nicholas Marriott]

Hi

Without many big changes to tmux, you can't make a tmux client talk to a
tmux server over a network (you can't pass file descriptors
remotely). Not to mention the huge security issues.

I think the way to do this is to write a new tmux client that uses
control mode. Control mode was designed to let a local client (iterm2)
automatically ssh in and talk to a remote tmux server. AFAIK iterm2 only
supports connecting to one server but there is no reason that a client
couldn't use control mode to attach to multiple servers. I am open to
making changes to make this possible even if it doesn't work today.

It'll be a lot of work though, because you are writing a new terminal
and a new UI for tmux.

Post by Merijn Verstraaten
Ola,
One of my age long pet peeves has been the poor integration between my
local tmux environment and tmux sessions running on servers, such as
having no shared clipboard, the annoyance of needing to different
prefixes for nested sessions, etc.
Recently I've been thinking a bit about how to fix this in a
satisfactory way. An obvious solution (to my na??ve eyes) seems to be
to allow a tmux-client to connect to multiple servers. Allowing the
user to list the sessions of *all* connected clients and select them.
From a user-perspective I would want "tmux choose-tree" to list all
sessions from all servers (labeled with the relevant server) and all
their windows and transparently switch between them. I'd want to have
access to the same copy/paste buffers.
Potential problems I see: - Windows can be shared between sessions,
but it makes no sense to share windows between sessions on different
machines. - Are copy/paste buffers currently per client, per session
or per server? If the latter two, the client needs to somehow unify
these multiple sets of buffers
This email is mostly meant to ask for opinions/sanity check before I
sink any non-trivial amount of time into exploring the
code/hacking. Is this a stupid idea? Is the idea ok, but does it not
fit the current tmux design without a lot of work? Any problems I
missed? Suggestions for resolving the above mentioned problems? Any
odds of working code for this getting merged back into tmux?
Cheers,
Merijn
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