{frontmatter}
Foreword¶
Nearly all my friends use tmux. I remember going out at night for drinks and the three of us would take a seat at a round table and take out our smart phones. This was back when phones still had physical “QWERTY” keyboards.
Despite our home computers being asleep or turned off, our usernames in the IRC
channel we frequently visited persisted in the chatroom list. Our screens were
lit by a kaleidoscope of colors on a black background. We ssh’d with ConnectBot
into our cloud servers and reattached by running screen(1).
As it hit 2AM, our Turkish coffee arrived, the |away status indicator trailing
our online nicknames disappeared.
It was funny noticing, even though we knew each other by our real names, we sometimes opted to call each other by our nicks. It’s something about how personal relationships, formed online, persist in real life.
It seemed as if it were orchestrated, but each of us fell into the same ebb and flow of living our lives. No one told us to do it, but bit by bit, we incrementally optimized our lifestyles, personally and professionally, to arrive at destinations seeming eerily alike.
Like many things in life, when we act on autopilot, we sometimes arrive at similar destinations. This is often unplanned.
So, when I write an educational book about a computer application, I hope to write it for human beings. Not to sell you on tmux, convince you to like it or hate it, but to tell you what it is and how some people use it. I’ll leave the rest to you.
About this book¶
I’ve helped thousands learn tmux through my free resource under the name The Tao of tmux, which I kept as part of the documentation for the tmuxp session manager. And now, it’s been expanded into a full-blown book with refined graphics, examples, and much more.
You do not need a book to use or understand tmux. If you want a technical manual, look at the manpage for tmux. Manpages, however, are rarely sufficient to wrap your brain around abstract concepts; they’re there for reference. This learning book is the culmination of years of explaining tmux to others online and in person.
In this book, we will break down tmux by its objects, from servers down to panes. It also includes a rehash of terminal facilities we use every day to keep us autodidacts up to speed with what is what. I’ve included numerous examples of projects, permissively licensed source code, and workflows designed for efficiency in the world of the terminal.
tmux is a tool I find useful. While I don’t attach it to my personal identity, it’s been part of my daily life for years. Besides the original resource, I’ve written a popular tmux starter configuration, a pythonic tmux library, and a tmux session manager.
I am writing this from vim running in a tmux pane, inside a window, in a session running on a tmux server, through a client.
A word to absolute beginners: Don’t feel you need to grasp the concepts of the command line and terminal multiplexing in a single sitting. You have the choice of picking out concepts of tmux you like, according to your needs or interests. If you haven’t installed tmux yet, please view the Installation section in the Appendix of the book.
Follow @TheTaoOfTmux for updates or share on Twitter!
Styles¶
Formatted text like this is source code.
Formatted text with a $ in front is a terminal command. $ echo 'like this'.
The text can be typed into the console, without the dollar character. For more
information on the meaning of the “dollar prompt”, check out What is the
origin of the UNIX $ (dollar) prompt?
on Super User.
In tmux, shortcuts require a prefix key to be sent beforehand.
For instance, Prefix + d will detach a tmux client from its session. This
prefix, by default, is <Ctrl-b>, but users can override it. This is discussed in
greater detail in the prefix key section and configuration.
How this book is structured¶
First, anything involving installation and hard technical details are in the Appendix. A lot of books use installation instructions as filler in the early chapters. For me, it’s more of not wanting to confuse beginners.
For special circumstances, like tmux on Windows 10, I decided adding screenshots is best, since many readers may be more comfortable with a visual approach.
Thinking in tmux goes over what tmux does and how it relates to the GUI desktops on our computers. You’ll understand the big picture of what tmux is and how it can make your life easier.
Terminal Fundamentals shows the text-based environments you’ll be dealing with. It’s great for those new to tmux, but also presents technical background for developers, who learned the ropes through examples and osmosis. At the end of this section, you’ll be more confident and secure using the essential components underpinning a modern terminal environment.
Practical usage covers common bread-and-butter uses for you to use tmux immediately.
Server gives life to the unseen workhorse behind the scenes powering tmux. You’ll think of tmux differently and may be impressed a client-server architecture could be presented to end users so seamlessly.
Sessions are the containers holding windows. You’ll learn what sessions are and how they help organize your workspace in the terminal. You’ll learn how to manipulate and rename and traverse sessions.
Windows are what you see when tmux is open in front of you. You’ll learn how to rename and move windows.
Panes are a terminal in a terminal. This is where you get to work and do your magic! You’ll learn how to create, delete, move between, and resize panes.
Configuration discusses customization of tmux and sets the
foundation for how to think about .tmux.conf so you can customize your own.
Status bar and styling is devoted to the customization of the status line and colors in tmux. As a bonus, you’ll even learn how to display system information like CPU and memory usage via the status line.
Scripting tmux goes into command aliases and the advanced and powerful Targets and Formats concepts.
Technical stuff is a glimpse at tmux source code and how it works under the hood. You may learn enough to impress colleagues who already use tmux. If you like programming on Unix-like systems, this one is for you.
Tips and tricks wraps up with a whirlwind of useful terminal tutorials you can use with tmux to improve day to day development and administration experience.
Cheatsheets are organized tables of commands, shortcuts, and formats grouped by section.
Donations¶
If you enjoy my learning material or my open source software projects, please consider donating. Donations go directly to me and my current and future open source projects and are not squandered. Visit http://www.git-pull.com/support.html for ways to contribute.
Formats¶
This book is available for sale on Leanpub and Amazon Kindle.
It’s also available to read for free on the web.
Errata {#errata}¶
This is my first book. I am human and make mistakes.
If you find errors in this book, please submit them to me at tao.of.tmux
You can also submit a pull request via https://github.com/git-pull/tao-of-tmux.
I will update digital versions of the book with the changes where applicable.
Thanks¶
Thanks to the contributors for spotting errors in this book and submitting errata through GitHub. In addition, readers like Graziano Misuraca, who looked through the book closely, providing valuable feedback.
Some copy, particularly in cheatsheets, comes straight out of the manual of tmux, which is ISC-licensed.
Book Updates and tmux changes¶
This book was written for tmux 2.3, released September 2016.
As of January 2017, it’s trivial to push out minor changes to Leanpub. Kindle is harder.
tmux does intermittently receive updates. I’ve accommodated many over the past 5 years on my personal configurations and software libraries set with continuous integration tests against multiple tmux versions. Sometimes, publishers overplay version numbers to make it seem as if it’s worth striking a new edition of a book over it. It’s effective for them, but I’d rather be honest to my readership.
If you’re considering keeping up to date with new features and adjustments to tmux,
the CHANGES file in the
project source serves as a way to see what’s updated between official releases.