Scripting Tmux Layouts

Tmux is an awesome replacement for Screen. I have a couple of standard terminal layouts for programming. One of them is show below.

  • Vim editor on the left.
  • Top right pane has the bpython interpreter. 
  • Bottom right pane has the bash prompt. 

I have a small tmux script in my ~/.tmux/pdev file that has the following lines

selectp -t 0              # Select pane 0
splitw -h -p 50 'bpython' # Split pane 0 vertically by 50%
selectp -t 1              # Select pane 1
splitw -v -p 25           # Split pane 1 horizontally by 25%
selectp -t 0              # Select pane 0

In my tmux.conf file I have bound <prefix>+P to sourcing this file. So now anytime I want to launch my python dev layout, I hit <prefix>+<shift>+p. 

bind P source-file ~/.tmux/pdev

Synchronize Panes in Tmux

Tmux is an alternative for screen. For anyone who doesn't know screen, it is a terminal multiplexer which means, it allow multiple windows in terminal. It can split your window into multiple panes (vertical/horizontal), detach a session which can be attached at a later time. Detach/Attach is very useful for running a job in a remote server without having to keep the ssh open the whole time. 

Tmux can be configured by  ~/.tmux.conf file.
My prefix key is Ctrl-q.
Synchronizing panes:
If you want to send your keystrokes to all the panes in your tmux window: 
<prefix> :setw synchronize-panes
In my case I do:
Ctrl-q:setw synchronize-panes
This is immensely useful if you want to execute the same set of commands on multiple servers.