My tmux workflow

My Tmux workflow is very close to my awesomewm one.

Window switching

The first similarity is in window switching, which matches my tag keys on awesomewm, only with the different Alt modifier. a, r, s, t, d, h are the six first keys on the colemak home row, which my keyboard uses.

# Window switching (by index)
set -g base-index 1
bind -n M-a selectw -t 1
bind -n M-r selectw -t 2
bind -n M-s selectw -t 3
bind -n M-t selectw -t 4
bind -n M-d selectw -t 5
bind -n M-h selectw -t 6

Window management

These are usually done by hitting the Tmux prefix and then another key. I remapped them to direct binds with Alt, like most of my bindings.

# creating windows and panes
bind -n M-x split-window -h
bind -n M-c split-window -v
bind -n M-b new-window

Scratch windows

To these basic switching shortcuts, I added two scratch windows: a generic one, e.g. for running the project, and one running Lazygit. These are opened in every newly created session.

# Generic scratch window
set-hook -g session-created[0] 'new-window -d -n scratch -t 100'
bind -n M-p selectw -T -t scratch
# Lazygit scratch window
set-hook -g session-created[1] 'new-window -d -n git -t 101 sh -c "while true; do lazygit; done"'
bind -n M-g selectw -T -t git

Session switching

On to the most useful part of my Tmux config: the tmw and tms scripts, which are fzf based window switchers, one local and the other for servers.

tmw can be triggered from tmux inside a popup, but it can be run directly since fzf can automatically open a custom popup thanks to the --tmux option.

# popups
bind -n M-w run-shell "tmw >/dev/null || true"

But it can also be used from outside with its command. It will automatically decide whether it needs to switch to a session or open tmux in said session.

tmw supports creating sessions in a directory by querying zoxide for short directory names. So if I want to open a session for my Nix repo, I’ll type tmw nix or tmw and type nix.

When a tmw or tms query string matches a session that isn’t the wanted one, a + can be added to the query to prevent matches, and it will be removed before doing anything else, allowing to force creation of new windows.

tms simply asks for a hostname and ssh-es to it through my wireguard tunnel.

Here’s a link to tmw. It is recommended to set good shell options (something like set -euo pipefail) in it, I do it with Nix.

The main trick tmw has up its sleeve is using fzf with -0 (which exits if there are no matches) and -1 (which exits immediately when there is a single match). -1 is set only if we have a pre-set query, otherwise having a single session would always open it immediately, preventing the creation of new ones.

Git link

Like all others, my Tmux config can be found in my nix config repo.