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tmux, the engine

matchblox stands on tmux. tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it runs many terminals from one screen. You can detach them, they keep running in the background, and you can attach them again to a different terminal. tmux is free software under the ISC license, for OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, macOS and Solaris.

Your agents run in tmux panes. matchblox finds them there, jumps to them with tmux switch-client, and answers them with tmux send-keys. Without tmux, matchblox has nothing to show.

What matchblox takes from tmux

  • A server that keeps running, and clients that come and go. The tmux server keeps your sessions when no terminal is attached. The matchblox service keeps sampling the machine when no console is open, and every console is a client of it.
  • Attach from any terminal. A tmux session follows you from the desk to a laptop to a phone. The console does too: run outside tmux, it lives in the tmux session matchblox, and every connection attaches to it.
  • One reference. tmux has one manual page. matchblox has these docs, and a test holds every key and command in them to the binary.
  • A small example config. tmux ships example_tmux.conf. matchblox ships config.example.toml, and works without a config.

Learn tmux