Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)

Posted by speckx 3 days ago

Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)(hamvocke.com)

455 points | 278 commentspage 5

mrexcess 2 days ago|

Rebinding C-b to C-a is a necessity for those of us whose muscle memory formed on GNU screen, been doing this for years. I like to set status-right to include host load average, with something akin to:

set -g status-right '#[fg=colour39, bg=colour234]#[fg=colour160] #h #[fg=colour088]avg: #(cat /proc/loadavg|cut -d" " -f1-3) '

ramon156 3 days ago||

I love that most tmux features are programmatic and unix-oriented.

> # reload config file (change file location to your the tmux.conf you want to use) > bind r source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Just seems fun.

That said, I still use zellij. I like the scroll info, the default bindings, and the fact it plays nicely with my setup of fish+alac. I might swap alacritty with ghostty at some point, but this works for me.

Witty0Gore 2 days ago||

I run tmux inside Termux on my phone to manage a couple of long-running Node projects. It's one of those setups that sounds cursed until you realize it just works. Session persistence is the killer feature when your terminal lives on a device that might close the app at any time.

jimbokun 3 days ago||

Any guides for tmux configuration that works well with Emacs? The use of Ctrl and Meta for basic operations conflicts with a lot of Emacs commands.

stebalien 3 days ago||

My experience is that Emacs wants to be your everything, and works best if you let it. Have you tried putting your terminals inside of Emacs instead of the other way around?

* If you need a "real" terminal emulator, you can use something like vterm (https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm/).

* If you need to be able to attach/detach Emacs sessions on remote machines, you can use something like dtach or abducto (https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco/).

alexhans 3 days ago||

Tmux conflicted with my vim bindings and i tweaked the tmux.conf to fit my needs. It's worth playing around on pure tmux and figuring out what would work for you.

sbinnee 3 days ago||

Though I also customize my tmux setup, the best way to use tmux is just to learn and remember the basics. Once you change the prefix bind or any other basic binds, you will have hard time on a new machine.

Btw, you can place tmux config at ~/.config/tmux/tmux.cong. No reason to clutter home dir.

hugodan 3 days ago||

I would love to have a way to switch sessions easily, like with panes where I just click or have more shortcuts available

maniacalrobot 2 days ago||

Here’s a simple session switcher: `bind C-a display-popup -E "tmux list-sessions -F '#{session_name}' | fzf --reverse | xargs tmux switch-client -t"`. No plugins, nothing fancy, just works.

nagaiaida 3 days ago|||

i just have a little script called session (invoked as session namespace name and mapping to a tmux session called namespace/name and searching all namespaces if the namespace is elided) that just does the right tmux invocation for the various intersecting cases of [in or not in a tmux session already, target session does or does not exist] which also has the side benefit of leaving shell history breadcrumbs i can follow between sessions later if needed

fenazego 3 days ago|||

I use byobu for managing tmux windows and sessions https://www.byobu.org/

gsinclair 3 days ago|||

People have developed plugins for this. Check out “sesh” for instance.

Switching between sessions with fuzzy finding, and creating new ones when needed, is a wonderful feature.

saint_yossarian 3 days ago|||

Check out the `choose-tree` and `display-menu` commands.

lozf 3 days ago||

Prefix-w works, or did you want something more?

Havoc 2 days ago||

The tricky part for me is getting it to behave with other fancy TUI stuff. eg both tmux and neovim stuff want to use the bottom row in terminal and neither seem to have the intelligence built in to compensate

robertwt7 3 days ago||

I really really like tmux, probably i'll try Zellij at some point but its always my default on a new server to install tmux, copy oh my tmux and vimrc configs. then voila I have everything. I have to say I feel magical most of the time i'm using it

christiansafka 3 days ago||

I would also describe haventerminal.com as making tmux pretty and usable! but without any setup steps, first class support for agents, and management of multiple machines. Disclaimer: It's a macOS app we just launched and it ships its own open source session persistence.

kenforthewin 3 days ago|

I'm constantly fighting with tmux copying. I want it to perform like native copying, but in mouse mode it seems to copy more characters than I want, copy newlines when I don't want them, and doesn't copy to clipboard in tmux-in-tmux situations.

maleldil 3 days ago|

You can use vi copy mode. It makes selection a lot easier.

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