crigler

dtach

C2021–2026

crigler / dtach

dtach

A simple program that emulates the detach feature of screen

Games & Emulation

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5Distinct people

10Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

760GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A simple program that emulates the detach feature of screen

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

> What's an opinion you have that most people don't agree with? > Haha. I specialize in having opinions people don’t agree with :) In kitty, the most controversial is probably…

rektide used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-01-15 15:50:41 UTC to 2026-02-25 23:03:30 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

10 sources

xpe·Feb 25, 2026

It can help to recognize that tmux combines three kinds of functionality: 1. process persistence; 2. client attachment; 3. view layout. If you don't like how tmux works, there are alternatives. I prefer Zellij [1]. (It also can be informative to take a peek at dtach [2] and abduco [3].) [1]: https://zellij.dev and https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij [2]: https://github.com/crigler/dtach and https://dtach.sourceforge.net [3]: https://github.com/martanne/abduco/issues/70

In Claude Code Remote Control

ranger_danger·Dec 11, 2025

I know this article is for Windows, but if you're wondering if there's a way to do this on Linux, there is: https://strace.io/ https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr https://github.com/crigler/dtach https://github.com/jerome-pouiller/reredirect https://github.com/pasky/retty

In How can I read the standard output of an already-running process?

jauntywundrkind·Dec 4, 2025

Tried 3/4 of the tools, and none helped me reattach neovim. Ended up using dtach. Needs to be run ahead of time, but very direct and minimal stdin/stdout piping tool that's worked great with everything I've thrown at it. https://github.com/crigler/dtach

In Zmx: Session Persistence for Terminal Processes

jauntywundrkind·Jun 13, 2024

There's also the longstanding option dtach, which similarly seems to be a lightweight re-attachable way to run a program. https://github.com/crigler/dtach For a while I was running neovim on dtach, which let me host all the terminals I might want. It has long felt weird that we have so recursively many layers of management and navigation: the OS juggling multiple terminals, tmux juggling multiple shells, and neovim juggling multiple windows. I was doing pretty good in full screen neovim for a while, but have backed down a bit, still find tmux navigation a bit faster.

In Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

hnlmorg·Oct 20, 2023

dtach creates pseudo-TTYs too: - https://github.com/crigler/dtach/blob/master/master.c#L53 - https://github.com/crigler/dtach/blob/master/master.c#L108 As an aside, that projects source is surprisingly easy to follow. I was able to grok it in just a couple of minutes. Kudos to the author.

In "[31M"? ANSI Terminal security in 2023 and finding 10 CVEs

rektide·Apr 23, 2023

Not the same, but I really dig using vim (neovim) as my terminal multiplexer. Vim has tools for managing windows, splits, all the things, and it felt redundant having two separate tools. The one thing I needed was a way to attach/detach it, and have it survive across ssh disconnects. I struggled for a while trying to use things like reptyr or others. Eventually I remembered/rediscovered dtach, which is a very thin very simple proxy, as opposed to a full on terminal emulator / multiplexer. https://github.com/crigler/dtach

In Boot to Vim, Vim as Pid 1 (2014)

rektide·Apr 9, 2022

I use dtach to launch console processes with persistence. I havent switched to neovim yet, but for a lot of my work I have very long running vim sessions that i reconnect to. I find it much nicer having a single system managing my environment than multiple different layers. Also tmux is a terminal emulator, where-as dtach passes through, and I find a lot less weird color handling & other bugs with dtach. https://github.com/crigler/dtach

In Show HN: tmux.nvim – turning Neovim into a terminal multiplexer

rektide·Jan 31, 2022Recommendation phrase

> What's an opinion you have that most people don't agree with? > Haha. I specialize in having opinions people don’t agree with :) In kitty, the most controversial is probably that terminal multiplexers are the devils’ gift to mankind. I cannot agree strongly enough that the virtualized rendering done by programs like screen & tmux is a curse. Trying to get truecolor tmux+ssh+tmux+vim working in truecolor mode is a disaster. Terminal-multiplexers emulate a screen and then render their buffered session to whomever is attached, and it's a frustrating, bad, lossy process. Often the original session and what attaches don't match, and there's not much one can really do. I am not a terminal expert but the situation seems awful, & is one of the highest elder crafts of computing, far more subtle & deranged than one could ever imagine. Kitty tries

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to re-build a lot of these terminal multiplexer functionalities itself. It has tabs, it has splits. Generally kitty is a pretty do-all terminal system. Afaik there's not really any way presently to solve the root of these mismatch problems, which is basically that programs generally don't reevaluate their TERM environment variable, even though these environs are technically editable at runtime (by the process, or outsiders). Kovid (Kitty author) talks about being a vim user. I too am a vim user. In fact, one of my favorite techniques has been to just live inside vim, to use it's terminal emulator, to get ok (i'm still pretty not good) at using it's splits and windows to lay stuff out. The one missing agent for me was that I wanted a way to be able to detach my vim session & come back latter. I spent considerable time trying reptyr & other ways to reattach processes. After much failure at getting vim to detach/reattach, to persist across sessions, I eventually re-encountered a program dtach[1] I'd run into years ago, which works great. Unlike tmux and screen, it's not a terminal emulator. It's just a dumb pipe that a program can render into, and a way to reattach to that pipe again latter. It can run in detached mode so that if your session exits, the program stays open. This way, I can just open vim & have my entire workspace inside vim, with whatever terminals I need, and detach/reattach the vim session at my leisure. To me, leaning into my console IDE was far preferable to leaning into a new terminal that has a full swiss army knife of terminal-features like multiplexing. I also don't believe kitty can help with the core, beloved detach/re-attach feature is 50% of tmux/screen (& 100% of) dtach's use. Persistence would make a great addition to kitty. [1] https://github.com/crigler/dtach

In Console – An Interview with Kovid Goyal of Kitty, the GPU Based Terminal

rektide·Jan 15, 2021Recommendation phrase

There are some dueling abstractions, yes! There was a good write-up from Anil Dash that picked up one of my favorite pieces of the recent TabFS write-up[1][2], _Keeping Tabs on Abstractions[3],_ noting that the browser & OS are each running competing abstractions for tabs. The application's invention of the Multi Document Interface (MDI) has done weird things! And I feel like most consumer OSes have done little to try to unify or provide options in the OS level, to take back territory. I as quite happy & pleased when Google's Chrome on Android had tabs each appear as tabs in the OS. I have too many tabs, but I enjoyed that it was up to my launcher, up to my os to help me work with that. It gave me flexibility & options to approach the problem. Where-as, when Chrome went back to managing tabs itself, it's both been a disaster for me (new t

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ab window shows me the start of my tabs, which has some years old tabs i only need occasionally), and a sadness, a defeat, that the OS can no longer manage this thing. > I do see the point of reattaching to shell sessions or attaching from multiple devices. I've recommended dtach[4] elsewhere[5] in this topic & here-by recommend it again! Very lightweight detachable proxy for persistent programs. I run vim inside of it, so I can attach/detach. Vim has terminals inside of it, so that's all I needed. [1] https://omar.website/tabfs/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338 [3] https://anildash.com/2021/01/03/keeping-tabs-on-your-abstrac... [4] https://github.com/crigler/dtach [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792205

In Terminal Multiplexers

rektide·Jan 15, 2021

Really nice cheat-sheet write up on screen & tmux & byobu. Also worth checking out tabs-rs[1] which seems very well reviewed & recent. Personally, I am a huge fan of dtach[2][3], which isn't a multiplexer, just a detachable proxier of terminal sessions. This let's me run a persistent vim session that I can reconnect to, and vim has however many terminals I need open in it. Vim does my multiplexing, dtach just allows me to make vim persistent. Very glad to have re-discovered dtach, to enable this workflow. Notably dtach is very lightweight. Unlike tmux, it is not a virtual terminal. Upon reconnect to my vim session, I issue a control-l to refresh the screen. Dtach hasn't retained the screen state, isn't translating between terminfos. The one thing that can go wrong here is connecting from different terminals- few programs have a way to upd

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ate the TERM setting once the program has launched. [1] https://github.com/austinjones/tab-rs [2] https://github.com/crigler/dtach [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dtach

In Terminal Multiplexers