It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal.

tmux

Learn Tmux

Learn to manage your terminal sessions and work more effectively from the command line using tmux. If you use the command line at all, tmux can make your life easier.

tmux bills itself as a terminal multiplexer. It allows you to wrangle multiple terminal sessions from one window. Instead of keeping track of many terminal windows yourself, you can use tmux to create, organize, and navigate between them. Even more importantly, tmux lets you detach from and re-attach sessions, so that you can leave your terminal sessions running in the background and resume them later. This is especially useful if you're working on a remote server: you can set up a persistent session that will continue running when you close your laptop. You can even share a tmux session to facilitate pair programming.

Wrangle your terminal with tmux

In this lesson, we'll learn how to detach from a running tmux session and leave it running in the background. Then, we can re-attach to it later.

We'll cover:
- How to exit a session by killing all active panes
- Detaching explicitly with C-b d
- Detaching a specific session with C-b D
- Viewing all running tmux sessions using tmux ls
- Reattaching with tmux attach -t

Reuse terminal workspaces using tmux sessions

In tmux, a window is a collection of panes. Creating multiple windows is a great way to organize your workspace. In this lesson, we'll cover:

- How to create a new window within a tmux session, using `C-b c`
- Navigating between windows with `C-b n` and `C-b p`

Create collections of panes using tmux windows

In this lesson, we'll look at how to manage your history between tmux sessions, and ensure that your setup preserves your bash history between multiple windows. By adding a special PROMPT_COMMAND to your .bashrc, you can update and reload your history after every command, regardless of if you're in a different session, window, or tab.


Handle history in tmux sessions

Sometimes you'll want to zoom in on a specific pane within a tmux window. We'll learn to use C-b z to temporarily zoom in on one pane, as well as how to resize your panes with C-b -L, -R, -U, and -D.


Zoom and resize to view a particular pane within tmux

Learn to organize your workspace using tmux. We'll create a new tmux session and learn how to create and navigate panes within a tmux window.

We'll cover:

- How to create new panes via vertical splits with C-b %
- How to create new panes via horizontal splits with C-b "
- Navigating between panes with C-b and arrow keys
- Closing panes with exit or Ctrl-d
- Viewing available commands with C-b ?

Organize your terminal using tmux panes

It's a lot easier to manage your tmux session when they have sensible names. We'll cover:

- How to create a new, named tmux session with tmux new -s
- Rename an existing tmux session using tmux rename-session -t
- Renaming sessions with C-b $
- Listing sessions with C-b s

Manage terminal workspaces using session naming

One non-obvious, but extremely useful, feature in tmux is copy-pasting text between panes. This also allows you to scroll back in a tmux sessoin. We'll cover how to use copy and paste in tmux using C-b [ and C-b ], for both emacs- and vim-style keybindings.

Copy and paste text from a tmux session

You can modify tmux's behavior with your tmux configuration file, .tmux.conf. You can use your tmux config to change color schemes, set custom keybindings, set defaults, modify the status bar, and more. In this lesson, we'll change some of the default color options as well as modify the prefix key.


Customize tmux with tmux.conf

By using ssh, you can share a tmux session, making pair programming much easier. We'll learn how to share a tmux session with another user. 


Share a tmux session for pair programming with ssh

We'll learn how to use mouse mode in tmux, including enable mouse control for resizing, scrolling and selecting panes. We'll also set keybindings in our tmux configuration to control mouse mode. 

Enable mouse mode in tmux

Do you have a standard workflow that involves setting up a specific tmux layout, or running certain commands? By writing tmux scripts, you can automate your tedious daily setup, while simultaneously documenting it for yourself. We'll cover the tmux command equivalents of common key bindings and write some simple, useful scripts.
