View the Commit on psmux

tmux is my favourite tool for working from my phone. It keeps the terminal session running on the machine itself, so I can resume where I left off. Phones drop their connection from time to time, and without tmux I would have to start over each time.

Windows never had that. tmux needs the terminal interface of Unix systems, which Windows lacks, so on Windows it only runs inside WSL, a Linux system running inside Windows.

Then I found psmux, a tmux for Windows written in Rust. It runs natively and takes the same commands as tmux.

I like it because of how I work now. A few years ago it was normal to sit at a PC all day, and agentic LLMs are changing that: more and more, I dictate into my phone, the text goes to an agent on my workstation over Tailscale, a private network between my own devices, and the agent runs the commands. I find that workflow cool in itself. The agent runs inside psmux, so when I SSH in from my phone I land in the same session it is working in, and when I put the phone away it keeps going.

But when I scrolled up in Termius, the SSH app I use on my phone, the earlier output wasn’t there, because psmux redraws the screen in place. I couldn’t read back what the agent had done. I wrote a client mode that sends the pane’s plain output to the terminal instead, and scrolling back works again:

psmux attach -f passthrough

I sent the fix to psmux (#900). The next day the maintainer had added it, tested it over SSH, fixed a bug I had missed, thanked me and sent a list of five things to improve. As an open-source developer you mostly hear from people when something breaks, so a review like that really got to me. I worked through all five in a follow-up (#913).

My setup is a stack of small tools: Tailscale, Termius, psmux and the agent. When one of them is missing a piece, I can add it.

In Star Trek IV, Scotty lands in 1986, picks up a computer mouse and talks into it: “Hello, computer.” That was Star Trek’s vision for the future: you speak to a computer and it does the work. When I dictate a task into my phone and watch my workstation carry it out, that vision no longer feels far away, and I chuckle to myself like a little kid excited for the times to come. I think we are on the precipice of changing the human-computer interface, and I enjoy working at that frontier of technology.

Gilles Colling

PhD student at University of Vienna. Physicist turned ecologist. R packages, spatial statistics, and computational ecology.