[mosh-users] Mosh, iTerm and tmux

[Keith Winstein]

Hi William,

Thanks for your message. This is definitely the nicest "why I switched back
to SSH" note we have ever gotten. :-)

You may be interested in our conversation with the iTerm2 folks earlier
this year -- please see
https://www.mail-archive.com/mosh-devel@mit.edu/msg00304.html

The scrollback is on the agenda for us; unfortunately I doubt the
integration to a native terminal emulator is going to happen anytime soon.
You could get somewhere by just running tmux locally (and maybe having it
automatically run "mosh server" when you start up a new tab), but I realize
that's probably not quite what you wanted.

Best regards,
Keith


On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 2:15 AM, William Uther <will.uther+list at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>   I recently discovered mosh.  Great work!
>
>   However, I've just switched back to ssh, and I want to explain why as a
> sort of feature-request so I can get back to mosh one day...
>
>   I'm not sure exactly what mosh features are needed for the experience I
> want though.  It may be that simply adding scroll-back is enough (I
> understand this is already planned -
> https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/2 ).  It may be that the option for
> sessions with multiple windows and tabs (as well as scrollback) would
> improve the experience.
>
>   Here is the experience I'd like to see with mosh:
>
>   My current setup is to use the iTerm terminal program on my mac with
> tmux.  iTerm interacts very nicely with tmux - there is a one-to-one
> mapping of tmux windows with iTerm windows and tmux tabs with iTerm tabs.
>  This works because tmux exposes a control protocol.  See
> https://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration and
> http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tmux&sektion=1#CONTROL+MODE  My
> current understanding is that the tmux control protocol and the mosh
> synchronisation protocols fulfil similar roles - the tmux protocol can
> handle more complex sessions, and on the other hand the mosh protocol
> handles unreliable transport.  iTerm acts like mosh-client for the tmux
> control mode protocol.
>
>   I use my setup as follows: in an iTerm terminal on my mac I ssh into a
> server.  I then run 'tmux -CC' on the server.  iTerm on the mac detects
> that tmux has started in control mode and so starts behaving as a tmux
> frontend.  It generally opens a new window for a new tmux session, but you
> can ask it to attach to a previous session (whereupon it will open new
> local windows for each tmux window).  You can then use normal mac UI -
> scrolling, moving windows around, etc - to interact with the windows and
> they work like ordinary mac terminal windows.  If you open a new tab
> locally then you get a new tmux tab on the remote machine.  Everything
> feels like you're working locally (or like you've opened a remote instance
> of a terminal program displaying locally using X forwarding).
>
>   The one advantage mosh has is the 'mobile' part.  If the ssh link above
> fails then the remote iTerm windows freeze.  You can 'force close' the
> local tmux session, ssh back in and re-attach to the remote session which
> will reopen all your windows, but it isn't seamless like mosh.  autossh can
> make things better, but it still isn't as good as mosh.
>
>   I can't just run tmux in control mode on top of mosh.  The tmux control
> link is not a screen state to be synchronised, but a protocol running over
> a stream, so tmux -CC doesn't work.
>
>   What I'd like is for there to be a native terminal program on my mac
> supporting the mosh-client protocol.  With just the addition of a
> scrollback buffer in mosh-server you'd get mostly the experience I
> currently get, with the exception that every new tab would need its own
> mosh connection.  That means an additional login experience (which can be
> mitigated with the right ssh-agent setup, but still requires me to type
> 'mosh server' at the top of every tab).  If mosh-server also supported
> multiple windows/tabs within a single session like tmux, then one
> connection would allow easy opening and closing of windows and tabs.
>
>   Is there any chance of this happening?  Would it be worth the added
> complexity?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Will             :-}
>
>
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>
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