TMUX

What is tmux

  • tmux is a terminal multiplexer.
  • It can launch multiple terminals from a single environment - effectively new terminal tabs
  • It can divide the window into panes
  • It can detach from a session and keep it running in the background

Installation

  • You can install tmux using a package manager e.g. sudo yum install tmux
  • However the version that this uses may be quite old so another approach is to build it yourself from source

Basic usage

  • PREFIX - this is the tmux prefix. By default this is ctrl-b but you can remap this to an easier key. The most common one I've seen is to remap it to ctrl-a. This works especially well if you also remap the Caps Lock key to Ctrl.

Tmux Sessions

Typically these commands would be run outside the tmux session

  • tmux new -s session_name - create a new session with the given session name
    • pass the -d flag to create this session in the background
  • tmux ls - list the running sessions
    • if there are no running sessions then you will see this error failed to connect to server: Connection refused
  • tmux attach - if there is only one session running then attach to it
  • tmux attach -t session_name - attach to a specified session
  • tmux kill-session -t session_name - kill the session specifed by the session name

Typically these commands would be run from inside tmux session

  • PREFIX d - detach from a session. This keeps the session alive and allows you to reconnect to it later.
  • exit - exits tmux and kills session

Windows

  • Windows in Tmux are a collection of panes.
  • They are similar to tabs in a browser.
  • Killing all open windows will kill the tmux session.
  • PREFIX c - Create a new window with a shell
  • PREFIX , - We can name windows so that we can more easily identify them later. This command renames the current window.

  • PREFIX & - Kill the current window

  • Closing windows by default will not renumber the existing windows.

    • Use movem to renumber the current window
    • Use movew -r to renumber all the windows
    • TODO Add set-option -g renumber-windows on to the tmux.conf to enable automatic renumbering.

Windows Navigation

  • PREFIX p - move to the previous window
  • PREFIX n - move to the next window
  • PREFIX w - display a visual menu of the windows. Select window and press enter
  • PREFIX & - kill the current window

Each window has an index and we can jump to a window directly if we know its index

  • PREFIX x - x is any digit between 0 and 9. Jump to the window with the given index.

  • Having 0 based windows isn't great considering the layout of the number keys on a keyboard. We can make the indexes start from 1 by adding setw -g base-index 1 to our ~/.tmux.conf file

  • We can find a window by name by typing PREFIX f

Panes

  • We can split the current window into panes both horizontally and vertically
  • PREFIX % - splits the window vertically
  • PREFIX * - splits the window horizontally

  • To make this easier we remap this to use the | and - keys to create the appropriate split bind | split-window -h and bind - split-window -v

  • PREFIX o - cycle to the next pane

  • can use PREFIX followed by the arrow keys to move around the panes.

  • PREFIX x - kill the current pane. If this was the only pane then this closes the window also.

Resizing

  • Tmux has a number of predefined layouts for panes
  • Cycle through these using PREFIX SPACEBAR
    • even-horizontal
    • even-vertical
    • main-horizontal
    • main-vertical
    • tiled

Command Mode

  • These prefix combinations are actually shortcuts to tmux commands with preset options.
  • You can invoke these directly from the command mode or scripts
  • Press : to enter command mode
  • PREFIX ? - list all the tmux bindings

Resources

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