use cases

The work doesn't stop when you leave the desk.

Six situations mtmux was built around. If none of them look like your week, you probably don't need it.

unattended agents

A 40-minute refactor you didn't watch

Agents don't fail loudly. They finish quietly, or wait forever on a permission dialog you'd have answered in a second.

So look at the pane. Open the session on your phone, read what the agent actually printed, and tap y — it is the same pty your laptop was attached to, so nothing is lost in translation.

iphone — work:1

⏺ Update(src/auth/middleware.ts) · 14 files

Apply patch to migrations/0042.sql?

❯ 1. Yes 2. No, tell Claude what to change

on call

Triage before you find a laptop

The first five minutes of an incident are k9s, logs and one restart. That fits on a phone.

Your jump-host session is already open, with the dashboards you left running. No key on the phone, no VPN to negotiate at 2am.

jump-host — prod

k9s -n prod

prod-worker-2 0/1 CrashLoopBackOff

kubectl rollout restart deploy/worker

commuting

Twenty minutes of real progress

Read the diff the agent produced, kick off the next task, watch a test run, fix a config line — all of it from a phone.

The client reconnects on its own, so going through a tunnel costs you a moment rather than the session.

travelling light

Tablet, keyboard, no laptop

A tablet keeps real splits, and a Bluetooth keyboard passes chords straight through — prefix key included.

Your workstation does the compiling; the tablet is a very good terminal for it.

long jobs

Training runs and migrations

A six-hour job mostly needs one thing from you: an occasional glance to confirm it is still moving.

Start it in tmux as you already would, and check the pane from wherever you are. mtmux doesn't wrap the command or watch its exit code — it just shows you the pane.

behind NAT

A machine you can't route to

A workstation at home, a box on a corporate network, a Pi behind carrier-grade NAT. There is no port to forward, and often no authority to forward one.

mtmux dials out, so reachability is not your problem to solve. If you'd rather it never left the building, mtmux start --local serves the LAN and contacts nothing.

shell

mtmux start --local

Network http://192.168.1.24:14100 (en0)

Try it on today's session.

Nothing to migrate and nothing to configure. If it isn't useful in a day, uninstall it — your tmux sessions never noticed it was there.