I had invited Nicholas Marriott to LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin to
give a talk on tmux. I was conviced I should drop screen for tmux,
but ... Yesterday would be the day I first installed the program, and
by now I'm actively using it.
It was not without pressure, though. I had volunteered to give a talk on tmux at work, and today was the date. See the quick'n'dirty slides here (in German).
tmux needs a fairly recent libevent. So if you want to run a recent
tmux version (1.5) on a Debian stable system, you should consider
linking it statically like so:
$ ./configure --enable-static
$ sed -i '/^LIBS =/s/$/ -lresolv/' Makefile
$ make CC='gcc -static'
$ cp tmux ~/bin
The sed call is needed to make the static linking work, otherwise
gcc will fail to find the symbol __b64_ntop, which is part of
glibc's libresolv.
First action to be taken is to make Ctrl-A the prefix. I mean, seriously, why would you use Ctrl-B? It's for "previous page" or previous argument!
unbind C-b
set -g prefix C-a
bind a send-prefix
bind C-a last-window
Next is the status bar. The syntax is pretty self-explanatory.
set -g status-bg yellow
set -g status-fg black
set -g status-interval 5
set -g status-left "#[fg=red]#S %H:%M "
set -g status-right "#H: #(cut -d' ' -f1-3 /proc/loadavg)"
set -w -g window-status-current-bg red
set -w -g window-status-current-fg yellow
Also, cycling through the windows becomes easier. The -r switch to
bind allows half a second time (set via repeat-time) to perform
the next keystroke without pressing the prefix again. So
<prefix><space><space><space> will move you three windows ahead:
# repeated space/backspace toggles windows forward/backwards
bind -r Space next-window
bind -r C-Space next-window
bind -r C-h previous-window
bind -r C-? previous-window
This feature is very handy for resizing or switching panes repeatedly. (Read more about sessions/windows/panes in the docs...)
bind -r h select-pane -L
bind -r j select-pane -D
bind -r k select-pane -U
bind -r l select-pane -R
Having multiple panes in one window is easy enough. Splitting panes,
however, is sort of counter-intuitive: A horizontal split (split-window
-h) will divide the current pane into two panes that are horizontally
next to each other – i.e., a horizontal split will introduce a
vertical split line between to panes. This resource has
a nice idea to make splitting more idiomatic:
bind | split-window -h
bind - split-window -v
For a great feature, check out link-window. If you do name your
sessions and windows in a predictable way so that you can match them
via fnmatch(3), you'll be able to do cool things like this:
bind M link-window -s comm:mutt*
bind I link-window -s comm:irssi*
bind K unlink-window
So with Prefix-M you'll quickly bring up the mutt instance of your communication's session, and will detach that single window with Prefix-K again. That's especially handy for things like Mail and IRC client, music player, Todo Lists ...
Side note: Sadly, it's not possible without some tricks to link a window from another session to a pane (sub-window) in the current session. (Think a ten-line-high IRC client at the bottom of your current window.) The FAQ says "[fixing this] is a big todo item but quite invasive".