Byobu [1] is a hybrid utility. On one hand, it provides a practical setup for those who need to work from more than one command prompt at a time. On the other hand, it provides a wealth of basic system information in abbreviated form. With this double benefit, Byobu solves two problems with screen space at the same time.

Originally conceived at the 2008 Ubuntu Developer Summit, Byobu is intended primarily for administrators who need to view multiple servers. In addition to providing multiple prompts within the same window, Byobu also displays two customizable status lines for monitoring systems. The program runs as a text-based window manager on top of either tmux [2] or GNU Screen [3], two earlier multiplexers, making it usable without a desktop (Figure 1). The name comes from the Japanese word for a folding screen, a metaphor whose origin becomes obvious the first time you see Byobu in use.

Basic Orientation

Byobu is available from the repositories of major distributions. It starts with the command byobu, which includes no options of its own. You might configure it to run the options of either tmux or GNU screen, but most of these options are either obsolete on a modern system – on which, for example, you can usually take UTF-8 character support for granted – or conflict with Byobu's own configuration settings.

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