How to Install And Use Tmux

This tutorial explains how to install and basic use of Tmux.

What is tmux?#

Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It allows you to access a tmux terminal using multiple virtual terminals. It means within one terminal window you can open multiple windows and split-views. Each window occupies the entire screen and can be split into rectangular panes.

This also means that sudden disconnects from a server running tmux will not kill the processes running inside the tmux session.

tmux is an alternative of GNU Screen.

Installing Tmux#

Installing tmux is pretty straightforward on most distributions.

Install Tmux on Ubuntu and Debian#

sudo apt install tmux

Installing Tmux on CentOS and Fedora#

sudo yum install tmux

Install Tmux on macOS#

brew install tmux

Starting Your First Tmux Session#

For your first session simply start tmux with a new session:

tmux

This will create a new tmux session and start a shell in that window. This window shows a green status bar with information about current session.

You can now run your first tmux command. For example, to get a list of all commands, you would type:

Ctrl+b ?

Creating Tmux Session with Name#

When have multiple sessions, it is difficult to find. We can create session by giving name which will be very useful to identify. To create a session with name, run tmux command as following:

tmux new -s session_name

Here, you should replace session_name with your appropriate name.

Working with Tmux Windows and Panes#

Type Ctrl+b c in shell to create a new window. A list of all windows is shown on the status line at the bottom of the screen.

Below are some most common commands for managing Tmux windows and panes:

• Ctrl-b + c Create a new window (with shell)
• Ctrl-b + w Choose window from a list
• Ctrl-b + 0 Switch to window 0 (by number )
• Ctrl-b + , Rename the current window
• Ctrl-b + % Split current pane horizontally into two panes
• Ctrl-b + " Split current pane vertically into two panes
• Ctrl-b + o Go to the next pane
• Ctrl-b + ; Toggle between the current and previous pane
• Ctrl-b + x Close the current pane

Detaching from Tmux Session#

To detach from the Tmux session and return to your normal shell type:

Ctrl+b d

It will keep continue program which are running on the Tmux session.

Re-attaching to Tmux Session#

You can attach to a session by name so we need name of the session first. To get a list of the currently running sessions type:

tmux ls

The name of the session is the first column of the output.

0: 1 windows (created Wed May 14 17:30:14 2020) [158x35]
copy_session: 1 windows (created Wed May 15 18:17:18 2020) [78x35]

Above you can see there are two running Tmux sessions. The first one is named 0 and the second one copy_session.

For instance, to attach to session copy_session, you would type:

tmux attach-session -t copy_session

Conclusion#

In this tutorial, you learned how to use Tmux to resume the sessions even after disconnected. Now you can start use of the Tmux to create multiple screen windows from a single session, detach and resume screen sessions.

To learn more about Tmux visit Screen User’s Manual page.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.