Awesome

MyTmuxConf

Dependency

tmux 1.4

pip install tmux-conf

Purpose of my setup style

I want to use the same tmux conf on all the systems I use.

Since they don't always run the same version of tmux, at first I need to check if a given feature is available on that tmux, and either skip an unavailable feature, or set something as close as possible up, given that versions limitations.

Secondly I want to easily see what type of system I am working on via the status bar color scheme.

Local machine, iSH on the iPad, local vhost, cloud host, test, acceptance, production etc

Thirdly I want to in principle always use the same plugins, with the limitation that some plugins only makes sense on a local system, and some only work on certain Operating Systems. In some cases plugins have fairly recent minimal version requirements, so that also needs to be taken into account.

Finally since I often use new cloud hosts, I want all relevant plugins to be auto installed first time tmux fires up on a given system.

Given all this, I decided to create a tmux.conf generator, that creates an appropriate tmux conf for the given system. With all the needed extras to do the overall tasks needed to keep things going smoothly.

Normally the processing just takes a split second, so starting tmux by first generating the conf file does not create a noticeable delay when tmux starts up.

This also adds the advantage of being able to use TERM settings to identify the running terminal. If you use iTerm2 this makes quite a difference, since it expects tmux settings not ideal to other apps to perform well. All you need to do after re-connecting with another terminal app is to re-source the config.

This is implemented in Python, using class inheritance to easily override things depending on environment.

Since I often work on new tmux-plugins, this gave me an easy way to test compatibility, especially using asdf, where I can have all versions of tmux available. This led in the end to my tmux conf being fully backwards compatible all the way back to version 1.7 Not that I would realistically end up using so old versions, more as a why not, and to see if it could be handled by this environment without too much pain.

This is not meant as a tmux conf others should use directly as is. The idea is to provide a tool set where you can use your own preferred config, with tools that makes it easy to handle the situation if you happen to run on more than one version of tmux.

See my setup more as an example, than something to be directly used.

As I am writing this, the most commonly available tmux versions on different platforms are 3.3a 3.2a, and 3.1 and making your env able to handle those versions should probably be more than enough. Over time new versions will popup, so for new features new version checks would need to be included.

Most likely initially you would only need to implement a content method, where you just paste in your current tmux conf.

If you want to you can use the version controlled plugin handling, replacing it with the plugins you use. Otherwise just drop your current plugin handling into the content method along the rest of your current setup.

Test/Devel env

If this env variable is set: T2_ENV=1 the config file created will use C-W as prefix and not accept ~/tmux.conf as config file, you would have to supply an alternate config file. This tmux instance will be able to run independent of the main tmux, either inside or standalone. Ideal for testing out new configs, and even run a different version of tmux for compatiblity tests.

host name based config

I normally start tmux with myt (in tools) it compiles a fresh tmux.conf based on hostname. I have supplied some samples in sample_hosts. Create a folder hostnames and define hostname based configs there, using the lowercased version of hostname -s for each host.

This way it is dead easy to adopt the setup depending on where it runs. In most cases I just soft-link (weird no longer works, now I need to copy the template to the hostname file if not in same dir) one of the sb/ entries to the hostname, to give it a suitable styling depending on host role.

Most of my actual hosts are filtered out for privacy reasons, I have left a few in here, as examples.