ttx Overview

A modern terminal multiplexer.

Features

The main goal of ttx to provide a good user experience when mixing local and remote terminal sessions, and support new terminal features in a timely manner (think kitty graphics/keyboard protocol). Instead of being a source of compatibility issues, I want ttx to just work when users try out new terminal features. And managing remote sessions should be simple and painless. Instead of having 1 terminal window and 1 tmux session per host, or nesting tmux sessions inside each other, ttx aims to unify remote hosts into a single terminal environment. I think this can be a huge improvement for developers who regularly need to develop on remote machines.

This project is currently in very early development, so there is a lot of the features listed here haven't yet been implemented. This list focuses only on higher level features, leaving out a lot of the lower level details.

• Platform support
  • Linux
  • MacOS
  • Windows (not a priority)
• Basic multiplexing functionality
  • Layout tree with horizontal and vertical splits
  • Multiple tabs (tmux windows)
  • Multiple sessions
  • Popup windows
  • Support session/window/pane switcher via Fzf popup
  • Full Unicode support (grapheme clustering and wide characters)
• Graphics
  • Kitty image protocol (APC passthrough)
    • Proper Unicode handling (specifically 0 width characters)
  • Kitty image protocol (actual support)
    • Conversion of image to text (e.g. via chafa) when not supported by the host terminal
  • Sixels
  • Iterm image protocol
• Daemon Mode
  • Terminal sessions are managed by a background process, allowing sessions to be saved after closing the terminal or dropping the SSH connection.
• Session Persistence Across Reboots
  • Manual save/restore (tmux-resurrect) (partial support (layout+cwd only, not processes or scrollback))
  • Automatic save/restore (tmux-continuum) (partial support (layout+cwd only, not processes or scrollback))
• Remote Machines
  • Support ephemeral connections via ssh
  • Support persistent connections via ssh
    • Will run a daemon on the remote which will synchronize locally.
  • Connection management UX
  • Support creating sessions/windows/panes using remote connections
  • See remote and local on the same screen at the same time.
• Extensibility
  • Settings
  • Plugins

Installing

See here.

Unicode Support

We aim to match the Unicode processing specified by kitty. This includes correctly handling emoji sequences and grapheme clusters. When ttx is run in a terminal which does not support this, text to fit into whatever the outer terminal thinks is a single cell. This matches the behavior of Neovim 0.11 when running in these terminals.

These issues can be avoided by using a terminal like kitty, ghostty, or wezterm. To check if your terminal supports grapheme clustering, run ttx --features, and see if the BasicGraphemeClustering feature is detected.

Building

See here.

Developing

See here.

Dependencies

• fzf program, for various popup memus
• dius library, to use its cross-platform abstractions.