Tmux in 100 Seconds

Tmux, an open source terminal multiplexer that can juggle multiple terminal sessions from a single window. It was created by Nicholas Marriott in 2007 after becoming frustrated with the limitations of GNU Screen, and is offered under the more permissive BSD license. As you can see here, I'm building some crappy software, and I have a terminal window open for a web server, one for Postgres, one for my Nginx logs, one for Htop, one for Nano, and one for Repel to say hello world. It's complete chaos, but things get a lot better if I run this tmux command first. Which will summon this magic little status bar. Now I can take all these terminals and combine them into a single window where they're organized in the status bar like an array. I can easily navigate between them without ever touching the mouse, split them into panes both horizontally and vertically, and can give each one of them a custom name. And if I accidentally closed it, all is not lost because the session is still running in the background. Also, if you're constantly switching between multiple failed side projects, it's time consuming to manually resurrect a bunch of terminal windows to set up your environment. Tmux can be controlled with scripting to define sessions programmatically. With just a few lines of bash code, we can instantly fire up multiple terminals for our project, with descriptive names and fancy colors. But you don't even have to do it all from scratch because tmux has a bunch of pre-built plugins, like resurrect will restore your environment after reboot, or use powerline to customize it in ways that would make even the most flamboyant peacock jealous. To get started, install it on any Unix like machine, including macOS, Linux, and WSL, then open up a terminal window and start a new session. Go ahead and run any random process, then create a new terminal window by hitting ctrl bravo, let go, then hit charlie. A new terminal is pushed onto the stack, and we can navigate between them with ctrl b followed by their index number. We can also navigate with the arrow keys, or split these terminals into panes with quote for vertical or percent for horizontal. Pretty cool, but oh no, I just closed it. But it didn't actually die, it only detached from reality. If we open up the terminal, we can run tmux ls to list out all the active sessions. When we find the one we're looking for, we can reattach to it and get back to work. What's really awesome though, is that if we create a bash script, we can do all this programmatically. Let's define a variable for session name, and then first check to see if that session already exists with the tmux has session command. If it exists, then we can simply reattach to it. Otherwise we'll use the new session command to create a new one, with the initial window handling our text editor. From there we can tell tmux to cd into the project directory and run vim. Just kidding, we'll run nano because it's far superior. But now let's open up another window called server. It'll cd into that same project and run some javascript slop. We might also need a window to run a docker container, another one for the database, and another one for logging. That takes care of our windows, but let's also customize the color and appearance. And then finally, we'll use select window to focus on the editor first. Now open the terminal and run the script to work smarter and not harder. This has been tmux in 100 seconds. This video is a part of my full linux course, which is available for firechip pro members. If you want to learn everything you need to know about linux and self-hosting your own virtual private server, try it out for free and use this discount code to upgrade. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.