Terminal multiplexer

Shashank Sharma is enthralled by screen multiplexers, and Byobu presents an elegant and efficient approach to managing multiple windows.

- Shashank Sharma

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.

If you’re running Debian or Ubuntu, or a derivative distribution, you can install Byobu with the sudo apt install byobu command. The sudi dnf install byobu command can similarly be used to install the project on RPM-based distributions. While it’s possible to build it from source, the project itself recommends using your distro’s package manager to install it.

Byobu is a Japanese word that refers to a folding, decorative, multi-panel screen typically used as room dividers. It’s not a multiplexer itself, but an enhancement of the rather vanilla Screen and