A beginner’s guide to Tmux: a multitasking superpower for your terminal

Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows a single terminal window to be split into multiple separate windows and panes. Its use has grown with the rise of command-line AI coding assistants and agent team workflows, which use panes to visualize the work of individual agents. This guide explains how to install Tmux on macOS, Linux, and Windows via WSL, and introduces its core concepts of sessions, windows, and panes. It demonstrates essential commands for creating and managing panes, switching between windows, and detaching sessions so they continue running in the background. The tutorial also covers enabling mouse support and creating a configuration file for persistent settings.