Tmux

My back problem wasn't as easy to solve as my hands. The issue had to do with my huge screen size that forced me to keep looking at the left top corner to code. That made my neck and my back develop a position I couldn't tolerate for long. "You need to fix this now" I told myself so I browsed the web for a solution as I did before when I had issues with my hands.

I didn't spend much time before I found Zellij, a terminal multiplexer made in Rust. With Zellij I was able to create a layout where I can put my code editor on the center of my screen to keep my eyes in their natural position. That helped a lot as my back and my neck felt much better after a couple of days of using it. Zellij was a good solution for me before its panel system started to break. I was disappointed and I had to find an alternative as quickly as possible. My best option was Tmux.

When I first tried Tmux before my back problem I got overwhelmed by its capabilities. There were lots of shortcuts and features I wasn't ready to master so I steered away from it for some time. Then, as you know, Zellij failed and Tmux was back in the picture but at that time I'd already had much more experience working with Linux. "Tmux shouldn't be a problem this time" I told myself and actually it wasn't.

One of the wonderful things of working with Tmux is to get a centralized workspace to run all sorts of terminal based software. You can spread them across sessions, windows and panes that can be laid out in any way you want. That makes Tmux a terrific and pretty efficient solution for developers who need to move quickly through their applications with just few keystrokes.

After some time using this new guy in town called Tmux, it ended up being part of my development arsenal. Its smart design healed my back and my neck and its features let me work faster. This is not a bad ending for a story at all isn't it?

Before I stop writing this entry I should mention that after getting comfortable with my new setup I could easily reproduce it on my laptop. That was possible thanks to NixOS reproducibility feature that took my configuration files as a recipe and replicate all the hard work I put on my set up to replicate it exactly as it was on my laptop. Pretty neat huh?

The NixOS-Neovim-Tmux trinity nix files is available for you to see here It's simple, it's meets my needs perfectly.