BYOBU
Terminal multiplexer
Shashank Sharma is enthralled by screen multiplexers, and Byobu presents an elegant and efficient approach to managing multiple windows.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in New Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the look-out for geeky memorabilia.
Terminal multiplexers such as Tmux and Screen are part of the daily routine for most command-line warriors. These amazing tools can be used to run multiple shell sessions within a single terminal, or display more than one application in a single window. But these tasks are beyond the capabilities of regular terminal emulators, and you must use multiplexers.
Although multiplexers such as Screen have been around since the late 1980s, they aren’t exactly welcoming to new users or CLI novices. Byobu aims to bridge the gap by providing a wrapper over multiplexers such as Screen and Tmux, as well as add some features to appeal to even new users.
Released under the GPLv3 Licence, Byobu started its journey as a wrapper for Screen, and was only available for Ubuntu. It has since adopted Tmux as the default underlying multiplexer and can be found in the software repositories of most popular distributions such as Debian, Fedora, Arch and Gentoo.