The Tao of tmux
The Tao of tmux
and Terminal Tricks
About the Book
The Tao of tmux has been newly edited, over 600 tweaks, 3 new sections and much more. Get the scoop!
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The Tao of tmux is an evolution of my feature introduction for new users written years ago. What can be said is since then, I've used tmux every day of my life on OS X, Linux and FreeBSD. That's locally and on remote machines I connect to via SSH. Oh, and even Windows 10 users can get a taste of it.
I first presented my original introduction to tmux at Software Freedom Day at Sun Yat-Sen University (中山大学) in 2013. It's after I coded tmuxp, my first python project designed to manage tmux sessions in convenient YAML and JSON configs. Since then, I've splintered tmuxp into libtmux, an object API build on top of tmux's well-designed CLI controls.
There is no one way to use tmux. It is designed to leave that control up to the user. You can use it purely to keep a process running in the background to resume it another time. You can use it to split one screen into multiple terminals, copy and paste between them, resize them. You can make it part of your daily life, or you can just keep it in your tool belt for a rainy day. There's no one true way, but there is a Tao, and you have to journey to find it yourself. To do that, you have to try.
And you don't need this book to do it. The tmux manual is great. Google is great. Other books are out there. My original overview of tmux is still available free. But I wanted to take a chance to do it my way and to have it available to the world.
About the Author
Table of Contents
-
Foreword
- About this book
- Styles
- How this book is structured
- Donations
- Formats
- Errata
- Thanks
- Book Updates and tmux changes
-
1. Thinking in tmux
- Window manager for the terminal
- Multitasking
- Keep your applications running in the background
- Powerful combos
- Summary
-
2. Terminal fundamentals
- POSIX standards
- Terminal interface
- Terminal emulators
- Shell languages
- Shell interpreters (Shells)
- Summary
-
3. Practical usage
- The prefix key
- Session persistence and the server model
- It’s all commands
- Summary
-
4. Server
- What? tmux is a server?
- Zero config needed
- Stayin’ alive
- Servers hold sessions
- How servers are “named”
- Clients
- Clipboard
- Summary
-
5. Sessions
- Creating a session
- Switching sessions within tmux
- Naming sessions
- Does my session exist?
- Summary
-
6. Windows
- Creating windows
- Naming windows
- Traversing windows
- Moving windows
- Layouts
- Closing windows
- Summary
-
7. Panes
- Creating new panes
- Traversing Panes
- Zoom in
- Resizing panes
- Outputting pane to a file
- Summary
-
8. Configuration
- Reloading configuration
- How configs work
- Server options
- Session options
- Window options
- Keybindings
-
9. Status bar and styling
- Window status symbols
- Date and time
- Shell command output
- Styling
- Styling while using tmux
- Toggling status line
- Example: Default config
- Example: Dressed up
- Example: Powerline
- Summary
-
10. Scripting tmux
- Aliases
- Pattern matching
- Targets
- Formats
- Controlling tmux
- Capturing pane content
- Summary
-
11. Tips and tricks
- Read the tmux manual in style
- Log tailing
- File watching
- Session Managers
- More code and examples
- tmux-plugins and tpm
- 12. Takeaway
-
Appendix: Cheatsheets
- Commands
- Keybindings
- Formats
-
Appendix: Installing tmux
- macOS / OS X
- Linux
- BSD
- Windows 10
- Appendix: tmux on Windows 10
-
Appendix: Troubleshooting
-
E353: Nothing in register *when pasting on vim -
tmuxp: command not foundandpowerline: command not found
-
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