In this video, I’m showing you how I use the tool tmux in my local WordPress development setup. If you’re using the terminal in your local development workflows, this tool can be a real game changer.

Tmux is a „terminal multiplexer“, allowing you to keep multiple instances of a terminal running at the same time. It is incredibly useful as it lets you keep SSH sessions and Docker connections running even if you close the terminal.

Tmux sessions are persistent, which means they keep running even if you get disconnected or close your terminal. So if you invoke commands that take a long time to run, like „apt-get update“ for example, you can rely on that command being executed even if you close the terminal session you invoked it from.

I won’t go into the details of installing tmux in this article, because there is a fantastic article on Linuxize about that already.

Instead, I want to use this opportunity to showcase a few of the use-cases I have for tmux:

• Keeping sessions to my Docker containers active
• Keeping SSH sessions to my Cloudways servers active
• Keeping sessions to my Raspberry Pi’s active (I use three for home automation things)
• Keeping SSH sessions to my Jenkins automation server active

With those examples in mind, there is obviously a lot more you can do with tmux.

My best recommendation is that you simply try it and get your hands on it. It is quite an abstract concept at first, but once you get a feeling for tmux and experience the benefits, it’ll become a staple tool in your toolbox.

To make things easier, read through the Linuxize article I linked above and keep a tmux cheat sheet on reference.