(OK, so I am a pathetic blogger. But when I do blog, it’s about tmux.)
tmux is the best. For some reason I woke up this morning wanting to talk
about my tmux session workflow.
First, the basics. One fullscreen iTerm window. tmux. A shim in my
bash (actually fish) shell configuration that starts tmux if it
isn’t already running. And a little script called s that kickstarts
tmux sessions for anything I’m working on.
if status --is-interactive
if not set -q TMUX
s kjell
end
end
As soon as I open a terminal window, tmux is up and running. I’ll get to
s in a second.
Sessions, windows, panes, oh my!
This shows the 8 sessions I have open currently. My server has been up and running for a bit over a week:
kjell 532 2.3 0.1 2467244 2372 ?? Ss 29Jan16 38:22.14 tmux new-session -d -s kjell -c /Users/kjell /usr/local/bin/reattach-to-user-namespace -l fish
I’ve been attached to this instance for 3 days:
kjell 82646 0.0 0.0 2435496 272 s000 S+ Fri04PM 0:00.01 tmux a
The graphic above is my “session switcher” (PREFIX-s). 7, highlighted
yellow, is active with 3 windows.
⁂ tmux list-windows -t kjell
0: fish (2 panes) [178x51] [layout f7f9,178x51,0,0{89x51,0,0,83,88x51,90,0,94}] @44
1: vim- (1 panes) [178x51] [layout 5b58,178x51,0,0,95] @50
2: tmux* (1 panes) [178x51] [layout 5b59,178x51,0,0,96] @51 (active)
shows what they are:
0 has 2 panes, one is a fish shell; 1 is a vim window; 2 is a
single tmux. These are running in a session called “kjell”, which is my
‘home’ session: the first to start and usually the last to end. It’s the
all-purpose session.
When I context switch to another session, I <PREFIX>-f <session id> to
swap to the windows and panes open for that project. I can leave things
up and running to minimize startup time. If only my brain could keep up.
I usually leave the sessions open until things get too cluttered. Then I go through and clean up old code I’m not using and take a breath of fresh air.
I won’t be able to explain it adequately, but here goes. Any two (or
five) programs can live side-by-side equally in tmux. A vim window can
sit next to a watcher command that runs a program each tile the files
change, showing me the results, successful or not. People swear by emacs
as an environment that they never need to leave. For me, having
tmux+vim+every other command line utility out there to be able to plug
and play is great.
I should really learn emacs though.