What is tmux?

tmux (or zellij or screen...) is 3 things:

1. A mechanism to persist your terminal session independently from your connection, so that when your ssh session drops (because you closed your laptop or your wifi changed), you can keep going from where you left off.

2. A terminal window manager, with windows, panes, splits, status bars, and so on.

3. A harness for letting agents interact with background processes and interactive terminal tools.

If you want (1) independently of (2), you can use tools like dtach. If you want (2) independently of (1), Ghostty, Kitty, iTerm2, and so on are all capable of split panes and so on.

I use backtick (`) as my tmux control key (instead of Ctrl-B or Ctrl-A). I somewhat regret that choice.