tmux 3

Productive Mouse-Free Development

by Brian P. Hogan

Your mouse is slowing you down. You’re juggling multiple terminal windows, development tools, or shell sessions, and the context switching is eating away at your productivity. Take control of your environment with tmux, a keyboard-driven terminal multiplexer that you can tailor to your workflow. With this updated third edition for tmux 3, you’ll customize, script, and leverage tmux’s unique abilities to craft a productive terminal environment that lets you keep your fingers on your keyboard’s home row.

You have a database console, web server, background job service, front-end build tools, a test runner, and maybe a terminal-based text editor running simultaneously, often each in its own terminal window. Switching between these tools takes up valuable time and breaks your concentration. With tmux you can improve your productivity and regain your focus, all without ever touching your mouse.

Use tmux to manage multiple terminal sessions in a single window, manage and run programs side by side in panes, and create the perfect development environment with custom scripts so that when you’re ready to work, your programs are waiting for you. Manipulate text with tmux’s buffers as you move text around freely between applications. Collaborate with others remotely and integrate more advanced features into your workflow as you manage multiple sessions, add custom scripts to the status line, and hook into life cycle events. Whether you’re an application developer or a system administrator, you’ll find techniques to help you take control of your terminal.

This fully revised third edition includes updated configuration commands, a revised method for pair programming, and hands-on examples of new features like custom popups and event hooks that let you add even more automation to your workflow.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

• Source Code (zip file)

Releases:

• B1.0 2024/10/07

Note: Contents and extracts of beta books will change as the book is developed.

• Preface
  • What Is tmux?
  • Who Should Read This Book
  • What’s in This Book
  • Changes in the Third Edition
  • What You Need
  • Conventions
  • Online Resources
• Learning the Basics
  • Installing tmux
  • Starting tmux
  • The Command Prefix
  • Detaching and Attaching Sessions
  • Working with Windows
  • Working with Panes
  • Working with Command Mode
  • What’s Next?
  • For Future Reference
• Configuring tmux
  • Introducing the .tmux.conf File
  • Customizing Keys, Commands, and User Input
  • Changing How tmux Looks
  • Customizing the Status Line’s Content
  • What’s Next?
  • For Future Reference
• Scripting Customized tmux Environments
  • Creating a Custom Setup with tmux Commands
  • Using tmux Configuration Files for Setup
  • Managing Configuration with tmuxinator
  • What’s Next?
  • For Future Reference
• Working With Text and Buffers
  • Scrolling Through Output with Copy Mode
  • Copying and Pasting Text
  • Integrating tmux with System Clipboards
  • What’s Next?
  • For Future Reference
• Pair Programming with tmux
  • Pairing with a Shared Account
  • Using a Shared Account and Grouped Sessions
  • Quickly Pairing with Upterm
  • Pairing with Separate Accounts and Sockets
  • What’s Next?
  • For Future Reference
• Workflows
  • Working Effectively with Panes and Windows
  • Managing Sessions
  • tmux and Your Operating System
  • Customizing Your Workflow
  • What’s Next?
  • For Future Reference
• Our Configuration