tmux Sessions Survive Desktop Logouts

tmux-session-running-date

Just realised another cool reason for using tmux even for local sessions on my Dell XPS laptop with Linux Mint 19: tmux sessions will survive desktop logouts! I started a basic loop reporting current timestamp every second and it hasn’t interrupted at all even though I logged out form Gnome and then got back in.

I’m still tweaking Linux Mint desktop and need to log out from time to time. I mostly worked on local projects in the past few days and had Terminal tabs instead of tmux managing my sessions. One of these times I logged out I lost output in about 10 separate tabs of various stages of progress on the same mini project. Not cool!

Turns out, tmux survives graphical environment log out, which means I’m not going to lose anything unless I reboot laptop or something like that. This is one of the fundamental features of tmux, but somehow I’ve been forgetting to use it for local laptop work.

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