tmux in 5 Minutes

If you work on projects that require you to open multiple terminal tabs, then tmux (and its super buddy, tmuxinator) will help you be more productive! tmux allows you to run multiple sessions in one terminal, and tmuxinator allows you to save tmux configurations.

For example, if you're a Rails developer, you could easily open separate terminal sessions for running a Rails server, a Rails console, and tailing logs. When working on a Clojure-based forum I have four terminal sessions running: a shell, a grunt server building the frontend, datomic, and a shell for deployments:

In order to start all this up, I only have to run one command: mux ath. This is much more convenient than trying to remember which services I need and manually starting each one up.

Below are instructions for getting started with tmux and tmuxinator.

• First, install tmux using the instructions (for mac users) in this gist.
• Next, install tmuxinator using gem install tmuxinator
• Create your first tmuxinator config file under ~/.tmuxinator/sample.yml. Its contents should look like this, where the command under server is whatever's appropriate for your environment:

name: sample
root: ~/path/to/your/project
pre: git pull
windows:
  - shell: 
  - server: bundle exec rails s

The pre option runs that command in the root directory before trying to open any "windows". (I think of windows as tmux's "virtual tabs"). You can then start this tmux session with "mux sample". To navigate back and forth between the windows, use C-b n for "next window", and C-b p for "previous window". C-b means "hold down control and hit the 'b' key". To leave a tmux session, you use the key binding C-b d. If you leave the session, it's still actually running; any process you started in your windows is still executing. I rarerly ever use other commands, but if you need more, here's a tmux cheatsheet.

To completely end a tmux session, you have to kill it. To do that, you run the command tmux kill-session -t sample, where "sample" is the name option in your tmuxinator config. I've created an alias for this, alias "tmk"="tmux kill-session -t". That way I only have to type tmk sample.

I hope you find this useful! For more information, you can check out tmuxinator's github repo. You can do some pretty crazy stuff, like split your terminal into multiple panes. There's also a a handy book on tmuxinator available from the Pragmatic Programmers if you want to really go nuts with it.

I hope you've found this tip useful!

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