When comparing abduco + dvtm vs Byobu, the Slant community recommends Byobu for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal multiplexers?” Byobu is ranked 3rd while abduco + dvtm is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Byobu is:
All of byobu's functionality is conveniently mapped to F1 to F12. It has a help menu to see keybindings and offers window tabs in an easy to interpret format. All this makes it easy to get started (can get in the way of power users, though).
Specs
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Pros
Pro Simpler and cleaner than tmux or screen
Contains less code. Does not have to be backwards compatible. Two separate tools, each doing its job: session management may be used separately from tiling window/pane management.
Pro Intuitive/carefully chosen keyboard shortcuts
There are the 13 shortcuts that let you accomplish the vast majority of what you'll ever need (Mod is ctrl-g by default):
Window manipulation:
Mod-c to create a window, Mod-l/h to adjust window size, Mod-j/k to change window, Mod-n to select nth window in view, Mod-enter to swap with master window, Mod-space to change layout.
Tagging:
Mod-t n to tag a window with the nth tag (1..5), Mod-T n to add/remove tag n to/from the window, Mod-v to view all windows with tag n, Mod-V to add/remove all windows with tag n to/from view, Mod-0 to view all windows.
Pro Fairly feature-complete and stable
Pro Easy to get started
All of byobu's functionality is conveniently mapped to F1 to F12. It has a help menu to see keybindings and offers window tabs in an easy to interpret format. All this makes it easy to get started (can get in the way of power users, though).
Pro Abstracts tmux and screen with a single user interface.
Pro apt-get or yum install byobu
If neither tmux nor screen are already installed, installs tmux. Both screen and tmux can be installled at same time. Switch between either easily.
Pro Adds OS dashboard alerts
byobu has support for OS alerts when an event happens.
Pro Basic package in Ubuntu Server
Byobu package is part of the basic packages in Ubuntu Server distributions.
Cons
Con Not as widely/consistently available as similar tools
This isn't too unexpected since it's not as popular, but it can be annoying; even Ubuntu's repo version is 3 years out of date and lacks the tag features.
Con Not so actively developed
Even though other options don't see updates often as well. Despite this, it's fairly feature-complete and very stable.
Con Can't be used as login shell
The byobu abstraction layers don't pass the parameters on to tmux or screen that indicate that they should run as a login shell. This means that you can't run 'ssh -t hostname byobu'. You need to use 'ssh -t hostname bash -l -c byobu'. A second implication is that the inner shell won't know to read the .profile file instead of the .$SHELLrc file. I know of no workaround for this.
Con Comparatively heavy
byobu adds a lot of functionality to the default tmux display. Most of that can't be implemented using the internal variables tmux provides, but requires executing external scripts.
This must be done on every update of the status bar, which happens once a second. That means that the system is performing a lot of forks and interpreting a lot of scripts for this "thin shell wrapper".
Con Adds only a relatively superficial abstraction on tmux or screen
Byobu still uses GNU Screen or tmux as the backend, so from a usability perspective it doesn't add much in terms of new functionalities, instead it only adds a layer of abstraction on top of them.