Shaun Seidman

Engineering Manager

tmux vs cmux


Saturday, May 16, 2026

One of my favorite coworkers introduced me to tmux and I understood why he loves it. Juggling terminals, SSH sessions, local dev servers, etc.

# install tmux on macOS
brew install tmux

# start a session
tmux new -s dev

# split panes
Ctrl+b %

# detach and come back later
Ctrl+b d

# reconnect
tmux attach -t dev

After trying it for a it, I came across an article (can't find it) and wanted to give cmux a try. Not because tmux is bad or wasn't doing it for me. cmux was positioned as modern developer mac tooling (huh?). Cleaner UX, better defaults, less "configure your life away".

# install cmux
brew install cmux

# create a workspace
cmux new dev

# launch the UI/workspace manager
cmux ui

# reconnect later
cmux attach dev

The biggest differences so far feel less about features and more about philosophy:

tmux:

"build your perfect setup"

cmux:

"here's a setup that feels good out of the box"

Both things are good. Just different approaches to developer experiences. I need to update this thing more often.