Historical errata for tmux 2

aclocal-1.15’ is missing on your system

Unable to make tmux on Windows 10 as per suggestion.

“Visit the list of tmux plugins3 and find one you’d like to install. You’ll find one for the batter meter we set up, another for OS-specific clipboards, and even one with sensible configuration options.”

“batter” should probably be “battery”

In our configuration (and the code download) you use “pane-border-active-style”, this should be “pane-active-border-style” as on pages 27 & 34.

1. colors for pane borders
   setw -g pane-border-style fg=green,bg=black
   setw -g pane-border-active-style fg=white,bg=yellow

(I can’t see page numbers from Safari. This is in the “Detaching and Attaching Sessions” section.)

“and then leave it running”
->
“and then leave them running”

In the first bind command on the page, is the dash after “save-buffer” supposed to be there? It doesn’t work for me with that present, but it does work if I remove that.

Installing tmux from git is not working by default under windows. I did this to build & install the latest release of tmux under Windows 10:
- after installing the Ubuntu subsystem, I installed git, libncurses-dev, libevent-dev and build-essential

- Then clone from git

- cd tmux

- git checkout 2.4
- sh autogen.sh (as stated in the Readme for tmux). This step gave me errors so I installed:
autoconf
automake
m4
libtool
libevent
perl
pkg-config

- ./configure && make
- sudo make install

In the “Conventions” section, it says:

Ctrl-b means “press the Ctrl and b keys simultaneously.”

I suggest wording this a bit differently:

Ctrl-b means “press the b key while holding down the Ctrl (Control) key.”

Two things here. One is that perhaps not everyone knows that “Ctrl” means “Control”. It’s easy to assume that everyone already knows this, but I suggest it’s worth mentioning. This is a minor point, since the key is typically labeled “Ctrl” on keyboards, but I suggest it’s worth adding one word.

The other, which I think is more important, is that you don’t have to press Ctrl and b simultaneously. I’ve seen people who are unfamiliar with how the control key works painstakingly trying to press them both at once – and I imagine they’d fail about half the time, when they happen to press b slightly before pressing Ctrl.

In fact you can press Ctrl, wait a few seconds, press and release b, wait another few seconds, then release Ctrl, and it will work just fine. Yes, that seems obvious, but it might not be to everyone. And the difference might be significant to some readers with physical issues.

> Finally, as you’ll see in Chapter 2, Configuring tmux, on page 15, you can
> configure tmux with a configuration file called tmux.conf . Filenames starting
> with a period don’t show up in directory listings on most systems or text
> editors by default.

“tmux.conf” should be “.tmux.conf”. (Otherwise that second sentence doesn’t make much sense.)

The argument “-t” to the bind command in the first code segment on p51 should instead be “-T” I guess… at least the error message I got while I tried that out indicates this.

Thank you for a very helpful book!

In the chapter “1 - Learning the Basics”, section “Working with Panes” you wrote:

even-horizontal stacks all panes horizontally, left to right.

even-vertical stacks all panes vertically, top to bottom.

The correct would be:

even-horizontal stacks all panes horizontally, top to bottom.

even-vertical stacks all panes vertically, left to right.

Note that when the stack is horizontal, makes no sense think in organization from the left side to the right size, as well as vertical stack from top to bottom. Actually each pane horizontally stacked already range from left to right (in length) and each pane vertically stacked already range from top to bottom (in height).

not a problem in this book, but for the new book “Small Sharp Software Tools” book description on the web site, at the bottom of the page about the Author’s other books, this one is listed as: “tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Driven Development” when of course it is Productive Mouse FREE Development.

I is not possible to search in the PDF!

the command to bind v and y to begin-selection and copy-selection respectively are not working in more recent versions of tmux 2.

Instead, they should be:
bind -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-selection

The final configuration includes the following line:

bind \\ split-window -h -c “#{pane_current_path}”

At least on OSX Catalina, the backslash needs to be escaped or else there’s an error loading the configuration. The correct line should read:

bind \\\\ split-window -h -c “#{pane_current_path}”

Many thanks for the book! Just went through it to teach myself tmux.