Tmux

tmux is a screen sharing tool used for Pairing, especially on our Hosted hack environment.

tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals (or windows), each running a separate program, to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached.

(from the tmux website) tmux is mainly intended for long-running sessions over flaky connections, but it's also useful for sharing a session between two users. It's much easier to do this with tmux than with similar programs like GNU screen. Here's the process:


 * 1) Both of you log into the same machine using SSH.
 * 2) One of you starts a tmux session:
 * 3)   The -S specifies a name for your tmux socket, for convenience.  This name needs to be unique, so "/tmp/pair" might not literally work if someone else is already using it. Instead you might use your username, or something like that.)
 * 4)   (allow other users to access it)
 * 5) The other one connects to it using

Now you can both see the same terminal, and can both type into it.

There are some security caveats: see here. It should be fine to screen-share like this on the hosted hack environment, though.