[mosh-users] Mosh, iTerm and tmux

[William Uther]

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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