I have been using tmux for quite a while now. Despite the fact that, I sometimes felt weird because of all the other colleagues use VSCODE I never thought of coming back to one of these fameous IDEs. I did not configure my tmux in crazy way however, I like taking the most of it. Whenever I created a new window (Ctrl+A+c) I immediatelly named it accordingly (Ctrl+A+,). This approach worked quite well for me but I soon figured that it was not consistent at all. When under time preassure, I often ended up with many unnamed windows e.g [~zsh]. I kept using these incorrectly named windows and soon after … I could not figure out what is where.

I had a very specific solution to this problem thus, I had no idea how to implement it correctly and I simply did not pay enough attention to this.

At some point, I have said that it has been enough. Surprisengly I found a very solid solution for myself.

The general idea is thatall of my work git repositories are stored in ~/Documents/work/.

Whenever I needed to create a new window and jump into a folder I used.

ff='cd ~/Documents/work/$(cd ~/Documents/work && ls -d */  | fzf)'

It worked as charm but I always had to do one additional step. This was renaming of a current window using (Ctrl+A+,). And this was my pain point. I wanted to come up with a name very fast and soon I ended up with very inconsistent naming convention. Not only naming convention was a problem. When switching among windows, I used famous (Ctrl+A+w) that give a user nice overview thus it requires either using arrows up/down to find a proper window (git repo) or hitting / and typing some string to match a target.

What is the solution then ?

My preference was that I would wish to:

• list through all of my git repos within ~/Documents/work/ folder
• based on results, open new tmux window for each folder
• give a window the appropriate name - name of a git repo
• split each window horizontally with 82:18 ratio so each window would automatically have a space for Nvim (editor) and terminal below it.

The hardest part for me was to understand how to use tmux commands: new-window and new-session.

How to start?

It is obvious that I had to start a new tmux session first.

# opens up a new tmux session and detaches off
tmux new-session -s "mac" -n work -d

Then I figured that I have to enumerate windows if I want to create them in already existing tmux session. Since this is bash - there is probably nothing easier than $(ls -d */ | nl -s:). Now I got git repos in following format:

    ...
    52:terraform-xyz-test/
    53:terraform-xyz-abs/
    56:utilities/
    ...

The rest of the code does magic for me.

[arch:blog main()] cat  ~/.config/thelper.sh
#!/bin/bash

# opens up a new tmux session and detaches off
tmux new-session -s "mac" -n work -d

# find all of the folders and enumerate them
for i in  $(ls -d */ | nl -s:); do
  wdir=${i##*:}   # takes repo name without number
  DIR=${wdir%/*}  # removes trailing slash

  tmux new-window -t "mac:${i%:*}" -n "${DIR}" -c "${DIR}";
  tmux split-window -t "mac:${i%:*}" -v -c "#{pane_current_path}" -l '18%';
done

Another option to use this script is to create a function in ~/.zshrc file.

function tmux-crowler()
{
  tmux new-session -s "mac" -n work -d

  tmux new-window -t "mac:2" -n "home" -c "${HOME}";
  tmux select-pane -t "mac:2" -U;

  for i in  $(ls -d ~/Documents/work/*/ | nl -v3 -s:); do
    wdir=${i##*:}
    DIR=${wdir%/*}
    tmux new-window -t "mac:${i%:*}" -n "${DIR}" -c "${DIR}";
    tmux split-window -t "mac:${i%:*}" -v -c "#{pane_current_path}" -l '14%';
    tmux select-pane -t "mac:${i%:*}" -U;
  done


}

Now what?

Despite the fact that my desired tmux goal came finally true, there was one additional, yet very important challenge.

How to swiftly switch/jump between the tmux windows? As already mentioned, a native shortcut (Ctrl+A+w) was rather slow for me.

It turns out that there is tmux plugin that using fzf and it works quite well.

bind-key / run-shell -b "~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-fzf/scripts/window.sh switch"
TMUX_FZF_PREVIEW=0
set -g @plugin 'sainnhe/tmux-fzf'

Well, whenever I need to switch between tmux windows smoothly, I simply hit (Ctrl+A+/) and fzf like search bar appears.

I also crafted my own alias but from some reason I prefer using (Ctrl+A+/) better.

Here is a simple alias that does the same job as tmux plugin.

alias tt='tmux list-windows | fzf | cut -d: -f1 | xargs tmux select-window -t'

James is awesome!

Links:

202403161903