Start tmux with specific layout - tmux

I have a question and searched on the web but didn't find a specific solution, or solutions didn't work for me.
In order to start tmux with a specific layout of panes, I'd like to setup my tmux.conf accordingly.
Now, I found something like this:
new -s my_sess # create new session
neww -n shell # create new window
splitw -v
Which has no effect, since I see only one window, not split into panes. Another trial was like this:
# Automatically set window title
set-window-option -g automatic-rename on
set-option -g set-titles on
# Split the pane horizontally
splitw -h
Which results in an error no current target.
It's probably a stupid mistake of mine caused by poor understanding. But I hope that people here might be able to help.

I'd say that this very basic task is covered abominably in the available tmux resources.
It cost me six hours of perusing material to come to a solution. The biggest help came from https://gist.github.com/sdondley/b01cc5bb1169c8c83401e438a652b84e
Your minimal .tmux.conf file shall be (you got there 99%):
new -s my_sess # create new session
neww -n shell # create new window
split-window -t shell # split vertically the window just created
and you have to launch it with tmux attach instead of a plain tmux.
I have created a gist to sum up my experiences. It covers also topics like launching different commands in each new pane.

If you create new sessions in .tmux.conf, you probably want to start tmux with tmux attach not tmux new. If you don't, you will be creating both your session in .tmux.conf and a new session, which is probably not what you want. Your first attempt looks OK, so I guess this is what you are doing.
Also remember .tmux.conf is only loaded on server startup, so only the first time you run tmux. If you want to create a new session like this later, put it in a separate config file and load it with source-file.

Related

Can the number of sleeping task in the current window be shown in Tmux statusbar?

I often use ^Z to make sleep a process, possibly open a new one, make this one sleep too, and so on, also moving between different Tmux windows.
So what I would like, is that the Tmux status bar update relevantly to indicate me how many processes are sleeping in the currently focused window.
Is that possible?
This is a common question - how to pass information from a shell inside tmux to tmux. The easiest way to do this is to have your shell do it as part of PS1 or some other variable that is evaluated when the prompt is printed.
There are two things you can do:
1) Set a user option with tmux set -w #myoption xyz, then you can use it in the status line with #{#myoption}. This has the disadvantage that it cannot work over ssh.
2) Set the pane title using the escape sequence, for example: printf "\033]2;xyz\033\\". It is then available in #{pane_title}. This works over ssh but had the disadvantage that there is no way to prevent applications also changing the title if they want.
In either case you will only want to run this when TMUX is set, so something like:
[ -n "$TMUX" ] && tmux set -w #myoption $(jobs|wc -l)

tmux: allow-rename, but ALSO override?

I'd like to be able to issue a command like this:
tmux new-window -n irc ssh -t eco /usr/bin/weechat
and have the title of the new window be "irc". Instead, as soon as weechat launches, the title changes to weechat.
I had been under the impression based on the tmux man page that if you set a window title explicitly, automatic-rename would be disabled for you:
automatic-rename
[...] This flag is automatically disabled for an individual window when a
name is specified at creation with new-window or new-session, or later
with rename-window, or with a terminal escape sequence.
But that seems to not be the case. What am I missing here? I do want automatic-rename in most cases - I just want to also be able to specify -n windowname and have it take precedence.

tmux split-window without changing focus

Is there any way to split a window in tmux without changing the current focus?
I'm running a script inside one of my tmux panes that occasionally runs "tmux split-window ..." with some command that takes a minute to complete and MAY request input.
I can end up trying to type input into one of the tmux panes but in the middle of my typing, the original pane executes "tmux split-window ..." and (mid word) my cursor shifts to the new pane, and I end up typing part of the input into the wrong pane.
Note: this answer is correct, but obsolete. The right way is to use -d flag for split-window command. I'm leaving this answer as a demonstration how to do some yak shaving with tmux.
A split-window command flag provided by tmux would be the right solution for this. Unfortunately tmux does not provide such command flag. Update: there is a -d split-window flag that does this.
The simple solution is to immediately switch to previous pane after split-window:
tmux split-window
tmux last-pane
This can be also written as a one liner:
tmux split-window\; last-pane
The downside of this solution is that *theoretically* you might end up writing a character in the wrong window if you type it in time interval between split-window and last-pane command execution.
Here another approach with the downside that it's more complex.
Create a new window in the background and get the pane_id of this window (note how this command is wrapped in $(...) because we want it executed in a subprocess:
pane_id=$(tmux new-window -d -P -F "#{pane_id}")
Now join the window we just created with the window where your cursor is located (will not change cursor focus):
tmux join-pane -b -t "$pane_id"
Add -h to the join-pane above if you want a horizontal split.
I recommend taking the first approach for it's simplicity. It's highly unlikely you'll have any practical issues with it.

tmux maximize/minimize pane bug -- "Session not found: tmp"

description of what's happening:
when minimizing a maximized pane, this message appears at bottom of terminal window: "Session not found: tmp"
pane appears to return to same place as initial/previous session
but the new tmp window (that was opened when the pane was first maximized) fails to close and appears in the list of windows (in the status bar at the bottom of tmux)
my hunch is kill-window -t tmp (in the below .tmux.conf code) is where things break. since executing a command in the tmp window appears to rename the window, kill-window -t tmp won't work.
so my question is: how could i alter .tmux.conf to prevent this from happening?
steps to recreate bug:
(note: you would need to have modified .tmux.conf for these commands to work)
start tmux and create session w/ at least two panes
maximize one pane using [prefix] + [up]
execute a shell command in maximized pane (*)
minimize pane using [prefix] + [down]
(*) if pane is maximized and minimized w/out executing a command in the shell this problem does not appear to occur. i.e. if you're editing a file in a pane, then maximize that pane, and only edit/save the file (w/out exiting and then executing another command), then minimize -- the bug doesn't occur.
30s youtube clip showing what happens: http://youtu.be/WMdOeJdOYuU
code that might be causing the error (from ~/.tmux.conf):
unbind Up
bind Up new-window -d -n tmp \; swap-pane -s tmp.0 \; select-window -t tmp
unbind Down
bind Down last-window \; swap-pane -s tmp.0 \; kill-window -t tmp
[edit: HERE IS THE SOLUTION]
thanks to a helpful #tmux irc'er (who has this link and whom i will happily give credit) this question is solved. i don't yet have enough cred to answer this question so i'm posting the solution here.
the solution is to add set-window-option -g allow-rename off to ~/.tmux.conf
this works b/c tmp doesn't get renamed so kill-window -t tmp can properly execute.
(thx for the help and feel free to answer this so i can give you credit!)
You want allow-rename set to off, at least for that one window:
set-window-option -g allow-rename off

Is there any way to redraw tmux window when switching smaller monitor to bigger one?

I started a tmux session on a smaller terminal. When I "attach" to the same session on a larger resolution monitor, it draws dots around the console. It doesn't fit the new window size. Is there any way to redraw and clean the window? CTRL+L or CTRL-B + R doesn't help.
tmux limits the dimensions of a window to the smallest of each dimension across all the sessions to which the window is attached. If it did not do this there would be no sensible way to display the whole window area for all the attached clients.
The easiest thing to do is to detach any other clients from the sessions when you attach:
tmux attach -d
Alternately, you can move any other clients to a different session before attaching to the session:
takeover() {
# create a temporary session that displays the "how to go back" message
tmp='takeover temp session'
if ! tmux has-session -t "$tmp"; then
tmux new-session -d -s "$tmp"
tmux set-option -t "$tmp" set-remain-on-exit on
tmux new-window -kt "$tmp":0 \
'echo "Use Prefix + L (i.e. ^B L) to return to session."'
fi
# switch any clients attached to the target session to the temp session
session="$1"
for client in $(tmux list-clients -t "$session" | cut -f 1 -d :); do
tmux switch-client -c "$client" -t "$tmp"
done
# attach to the target session
tmux attach -t "$session"
}
takeover 'original session' # or the session number if you do not name sessions
The screen will shrink again if a smaller client switches to the session.
There is also a variation where you only "take over" the window (link the window into a new session, set aggressive-resize, and switch any other sessions that have that window active to some other window), but it is harder to script in the general case (and different to “exit” since you would want to unlink the window or kill the session instead of just detaching from the session).
You can always press CTRL-B + SHIFT-D to choose which client you want to detach from the session.
tmux will list all sessions with their current dimension. Then you simply detach from all the smaller sized sessions.
A simpler solution on recent versions of tmux (tested on 1.9) you can now do :
tmux detach -a
-a is for all other client on this session except the current one
You can alias it in your .[bash|zsh]rc
alias takeover="tmux detach -a"
Workflow: You can connect to your session normally, and if you are bothered by another session that forced down your tmux window size you can simply call takeover.
This is still the top post when searching, but it's no longer valid. Best answer is here, but the TLDR is
<c-b>:resize-window -A
You can use <Ctrl-B> : + at -d <CR> to redraw the tmux window.
The other answers did not help me as I only had client attached (the previous one that started the session was already detached).
To fix it I followed the answer here (I was not using xterm).
Which simply said:
Detach from tmux session
Run resize linux command
Reattach to tmux session
I just ran into this problem and stumbled across a different situation. Although it's probably just a unicorn, I thought I'd lay it out.
I had one session that was smaller, and I noticed that the font sizes were different: the smaller session had the smaller fonts. Apparently, I had changed window font sizes for some reason.
So in OS X, I just did Cmd-+ on the smaller sized session, and it snapped back into place.
Probably an strange edge case but for me the only thing that fixed it was unmaximizing the window and then maximizing it again.
ps ax | grep tmux
17685 pts/22 S+ 0:00 tmux a -t 13g2
17920 pts/11 S+ 0:00 tmux a -t 13g2
18065 pts/19 S+ 0:00 grep tmux
kill the other one.
I had the same problem because of using iTerm's tmux integration (i.e., tmux -CC a).
None of the detach options mentioned in the other answers worked for me, because there was no "other sessions" to detach from.
My understanding is iTerm's tmux client seems to hard set the window size on the attached session, so the subsequent attaches seem to respect the previously resized window size.
Alas, I ended up reattaching iTerm client to tmux via tmux -CC a and manually resized to full window size in GUI (not happy using mouse here, but that is what worked in the end, unfortunately). Clean detach from iTerm and subsequent attaches follows the size set in iTerm.
I use Ctrl-b + q which makes it flash number for each pane, redrawing them on the way.

Resources