Share a tmux session with someone with tmate

New port of the week, and it’s about tmate.

If you ever wanted to share a terminal with someone without opening a remote access to your computer, tmate is the right tool for this.

Once started, tmate will create a new tmux instance connected through the tmate public server, by typing tmate show-messages you will get url for read-only or read-write links to share with someone, by ssh or web browser. Don’t forget to type clear to hide url after typing show-messages, otherwise viewing people will have access to the write url (and it’s not something you want).

If you don’t like the need of a third party, you can setup your own server, but we won’t cover this in this article.

When you want to end the share, you just need to exit the tmux opened by tmate.

If you want to install it on OpenBSD, just type pkg_add tmate and you are done. I think it’s available on most unix systems.

There is no much more to say about it, it’s great, simple, work out-of-the-box with no configuration needed.