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tmux-up

Bootstrap new tmux sessions without complex tools, DSLs, or dependencies.

Install

If you use fresh to manage your dotfiles, just run:

fresh jamesottaway/tmux-up tmux-up --bin

If not, you might want to try bpkg:

bpkg install jamesottaway/tmux-up

Alternatively just fetch the script with either curl or wget, and make sure it's executable:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamesottaway/tmux-up/master/tmux-up > /usr/local/bin/tmux-up
wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamesottaway/tmux-up/master/tmux-up > /usr/local/bin/tmux-up
chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/tmux-up

Usage

Define the desired initial state of your tmux session in a file, using the standard tmux commands.

For example, here is dev.conf for a fictional Rails application development environment:

send-keys 'git up' C-m
send-keys 'git checkout develop' C-m
send-keys 'bundle install' C-m
new-window
send-keys 'vim' C-m
new-window -n server
send-keys 'rails server' C-m
new-window -n console
send-keys 'rails console' C-m
new-window -n db
send-keys 'psql -d example_development' C-m

To create a new tmux session using the above configuration just run:

~/example ❯ tmux-up dev.conf

Under the hood tmux-up will:

  • Create a tmux session named example/dev
  • Invoke each line in dev.conf
  • Switch to the first tmux window
  • Attach to the example/dev session

If you detach from the example/dev session, simply re-run tmux-up dev.conf which will reattach you to the session.

Alternatives

There are quite a lot of other approaches to this problem already floating around.

tmuxinator, teamocil, etc.

These tools are very popular, but having a dependency on a working Ruby environment (or similar) for a simple tool like this seems like overkill.

As a contrast, tmux-up is a simple shell script, meaning it will run anywhere tmux will.

In addition to this, these tools commonly use abstracted formats to define your session configuration, which increases the difficulty of adopting such a tool.

In the case of tmux-up, you use native tmux commands like new-window and send-keys.

Plain ol' tmux

The other end of the spectrum would be to invoke tmux directly, but override the configuration using the -f flag.

I don't like this approach, for two reasons:

  • you need to add source-file ~/.tmux.conf (or wherever your default config lives) to ensure your top-level configuration is respected

  • you need to remember to append the attach command, since tmux always calls new-session when it starts

To avoid these pitfalls, tmux-up dev.conf is functionally identical to tmux -f dev.conf attach.