| tmux frequently asked questions |
| |
| ****************************************************************************** |
| * PLEASE NOTE: most display problems are due to incorrect TERM! Before * |
| * reporting problems make SURE that TERM settings are correct inside and * |
| * outside tmux. * |
| * * |
| * Inside tmux TERM must be "screen" or similar (such as "screen-256color"). * |
| * Don't bother reporting problems where it isn't! * |
| * * |
| * Outside, it must match your terminal: particularly, use "rxvt" for rxvt * |
| * and derivatives. * |
| ****************************************************************************** |
| |
| * How is tmux different from GNU screen? |
| |
| tmux and GNU screen have many similarities. Some of the main differences I am |
| aware of are (bearing in mind I haven't used screen for a few years now): |
| |
| - tmux uses a client-server model. Each server has single Unix domain socket in |
| /tmp and within one server there are multiple sessions which may be attached |
| to multiple clients (terminals). |
| |
| This has advantages, notably: windows may be linked simultaneously to |
| multiple sessions; windows may be moved freely between sessions; and a client |
| may be switched between sessions easily (C-b D). There is one major |
| disadvantage: if the server crashes, game over, all sessions die. In |
| practice, however, tmux is quite stable and gets more so as people report any |
| bugs they hit :-). |
| |
| This model is different from screen, where typically each new screen instance |
| is independent. tmux supports the same behaviour by using multiple servers |
| with the -L option but it is not typically recommended. |
| |
| - Different command interfaces. One of the goals of tmux is that the shell |
| should be easily usable as a scripting language - almost all tmux commands |
| can be used from the shell and behave identically whether used from the |
| shell, from a key binding or from the command prompt. Personally I also find |
| tmux's command interface much more consistent and clearer, but this is |
| subjective. |
| |
| - tmux calls window names (what you see in the status line) "names", screen |
| calls them "titles". |
| |
| - tmux has a multiple paste buffers. Not a major one but comes in handy quite a |
| lot. |
| |
| - tmux supports automatically renaming windows to the running application |
| without gross hacks using escape sequences. Its even on by default. |
| |
| - tmux has a choice of vi or emacs key layouts. Again, not major, but I use |
| emacs so if tmux did support only one key set it would be emacs and then all |
| the vi users would get humpy. Key bindings may be completely reconfigured in |
| any case. |
| |
| - tmux has an option to limit the window size. |
| |
| - tmux has search in windows (C-b f). |
| |
| - The window split (pane) model is different. tmux has two objects, windows and |
| panes; screen has just windows. This difference has several implications: |
| |
| * In screen you can have a window appear in several layouts, in tmux a pane |
| can only be in one window (fixing this is a big todo item but quite |
| invasive). |
| |
| * tmux layouts are immutable and do not get changed unless you modify them. |
| |
| * In tmux, all panes are closed when you kill a window. |
| |
| * tmux panes do not have individual names, titles and so on. |
| |
| I think tmux's model is much easier to manage and navigate within a window, |
| but breaking panes off from and joining them to windows is more clumsy. |
| |
| tmux also has support for preset pane layouts. |
| |
| - tmux's status line syntax is more readable and easier to use. I think it'd be |
| hard for anyone to argue with this. tmux doesn't support running a command |
| constantly and always using the last line of its output, commands must be run |
| again each time. |
| |
| - tmux has modern, easily extended code. Again hard to argue screen is better |
| if you have looked at the code. |
| |
| - tmux depends on libevent. I don't see this as a disadvantage: libevent is |
| small and portable, and on modern systems with current package management |
| systems dependencies are not an issue. libevent brings advantages in code |
| simplicity and performance. |
| |
| - screen allows the window to be bigger than the terminal and can pan around |
| it. tmux limits the size to the largest attached client. This is a big todo |
| item for tmux but it is not trivial. |
| |
| - screen has builtin serial and telnet support; this is bloat and is unlikely |
| to be added to tmux. |
| |
| - screen has support for updating utmp. Nobody has really come up with a clean, |
| portable way to do this without making tmux setuid or setgid yet. |
| |
| - Environment handling is different. |
| |
| - tmux tends to be more demanding on the terminal so tends to show up terminal |
| and application bugs which screen does not. |
| |
| - screen has wider platform support, for example IRIX and HP-UX, and for odd |
| terminals. |
| |
| * I found a bug! What do I do? |
| |
| Please send bug reports by email to nicm@users.sourceforge.net or |
| tmux-users@lists.sourceforge.net. Please include as much of the following |
| information as possible: |
| |
| - the version of tmux you are running; |
| - the operating system you are using and its version; |
| - the terminal emulator you are using and the TERM setting when tmux was |
| started; |
| - a description of the problem; |
| - if the problem is repeatable, the steps to repeat the problem; |
| - for screen corruption issues, a screenshot and the output of "infocmp $TERM" |
| from outside tmux are often very useful. |
| |
| * Why doesn't tmux do $x? |
| |
| Please send feature requests by email to nicm@users.sourceforge.net. |
| |
| * Why do you use the screen terminal description inside tmux? It sucks. |
| |
| It is already widely available. It is planned to change to something else such |
| as xterm-xfree86 at some point, if possible. |
| |
| * I don't see any colour in my terminal! Help! |
| |
| On some platforms, common terminal descriptions such as xterm do not include |
| colour. screen ignores this, tmux does not. If the terminal emulator in use |
| supports colour, use a value for TERM which correctly lists this, such as |
| xterm-color. |
| |
| * tmux freezes my terminal when I attach to a session. I even have to kill -9 |
| the shell it was started from to recover! |
| |
| Some consoles really really don't like attempts to set the window title. Tell |
| tmux not to do this by turning off the "set-titles" option (you can do this |
| in .tmux.conf): |
| |
| set -g set-titles off |
| |
| If this doesn't fix it, send a bug report. |
| |
| * Why is C-b the prefix key? How do I change it? |
| |
| The default key is C-b because the prototype of tmux was originally developed |
| inside screen and C-b was chosen not to clash with the screen meta key. It |
| also has the advantage of not interfering with the use of C-a for start-of-line |
| in emacs and the shell (although it does interfere with previous-character). |
| |
| Changing is simple: change the "prefix-key" option, and - if required - move |
| the binding of the "send-prefix" command from C-b (C-b C-b sends C-b by |
| default) to the new key. For example: |
| |
| set -g prefix C-a |
| unbind C-b |
| bind C-a send-prefix |
| |
| * How do I use UTF-8? |
| |
| When running tmux in a UTF-8 capable terminal, UTF-8 must be turned on in tmux; |
| as of release 0.9, tmux attempts to autodetect a UTF-8-capable terminal by |
| checking the LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG environment variables. list-clients may |
| be used to check if this is detected correctly; if not, the -u command-line |
| flag may be specified when creating or attaching a client to a tmux session: |
| |
| $ tmux -u new |
| |
| Since the 1.0 release, tmux will turn on UTF-8 related options automatically |
| (ie status-utf8, and utf8) if the above conditions are met. |
| |
| * How do I use a 256 colour terminal? |
| |
| Provided the underlying terminal supports 256 colours, it is usually sufficient |
| to add the following to ~/.tmux.conf: |
| |
| set -g default-terminal "screen-256color" |
| |
| Note that some platforms do not support "screen-256color" ("infocmp |
| screen-256color" will return an error) - in this case see the next entry in |
| this FAQ. |
| |
| tmux attempts to detect a 256 colour terminal both by looking at the colors |
| terminfo entry and by looking for the string "256col" in the TERM environment |
| variable. |
| |
| If both these methods fail, the -2 flag may be passed to tmux when attaching |
| to a session to indicate the terminal supports 256 colours. |
| |
| * vim or $otherprogram doesn't display 256 colours. What's up? |
| |
| Some programs attempt to detect the number of colours a terminal is capable of |
| by checking the colors terminfo or Co termcap entry. However, this is not |
| reliable, and in any case is missing from the "screen" terminal description |
| used inside tmux. |
| |
| There are two options (aside from using "screen-256color") to allow programs to |
| recognise they are running on a 256-colour terminal inside tmux: |
| |
| - Manually force the application to use 256 colours always or if TERM is set to |
| screen. For vim, you can do this by overriding the t_Co option, see |
| http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/256_colors_in_vim. |
| - Creating a custom terminfo file that includes colors#256 in ~/.terminfo and |
| using it instead. These may be compiled with tic(1). |
| |
| * How do I make Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn work in vim? |
| |
| tmux supports passing through ctrl (and where supported by the client terminal, |
| alt and shift) modifiers to function keys using xterm(1)-style key sequences. |
| This may be enabled per window, or globally with the tmux command: |
| |
| setw -g xterm-keys on |
| |
| Because the TERM variable inside tmux must be set to "screen", vim will not |
| automatically detect these keys are available; however, the appropriate key |
| sequences can be overridden in .vimrc using the following: |
| |
| if &term == "screen" |
| set t_kN=^[[6;*~ |
| set t_kP=^[[5;*~ |
| endif |
| |
| And similarly for any other keys for which modifiers are desired. |
| |
| Please note that the "xterm-keys" setting may affect other programs, in the |
| same way as running them in a standard xterm; for example most shells do not |
| expect to receive xterm(1)-style key sequences so this setting may prevent keys |
| such as ctrl-left and ctrl-right working correctly. tmux also passes through |
| the ctrl (bit 5 set, for example ^[[5~ to ^[[5^) modifier in non-xterm(1) mode; |
| it may be possible to configure vim to accept these, an example of how to do so |
| would be welcome. |
| |
| vim users may also want to set the "ttyfast" option inside tmux. |
| |
| * Why doesn't elinks set the window title inside tmux? |
| |
| There isn't a way to detect if a terminal supports setting the window title, so |
| elinks attempts to guess by looking at the environment. Rather than looking for |
| TERM=screen, it uses the STY variable to detect if it is running in screen; |
| tmux does not use this so the check fails. A workaround is to set STY before |
| running elinks. |
| |
| The following shell function does this, and also clears the window title on |
| exit (elinks, for some strange reason, sets it to the value of TERM): |
| |
| elinks() { |
| STY= `which elinks` $* |
| echo -ne \\033]0\;\\007; |
| } |
| |
| * What is the proper way to escape characters with #(command)? |
| |
| When using the #(command) construction to include the output from a command in |
| the status line, the command will be parsed twice. First, when it's read by the |
| configuration file or the command-prompt parser, and second when the status |
| line is being drawn and the command is passed to the shell. For example, to |
| echo the string "(test)" to the status line, either single or double quotes |
| could be used: |
| |
| set -g status-right "#(echo \\\\(test\\\\))" |
| set -g status-right '#(echo \\\(test\\\))' |
| |
| In both cases, the status-right option will be set to the string "#(echo |
| \\(test\\))" and the command executed will be "echo \(test\)". |
| |
| * tmux uses too much CPU. What do I do? |
| |
| Automatic window renaming may use a lot of CPU, particularly on slow computers: |
| if this is a problem, turn it off with "setw -g automatic-rename off". If this |
| doesn't fix it, please report the problem. |
| |
| * I use PuTTY and my tmux window pane separators are all qqqqqqqqq's! |
| |
| PuTTY is using a character set translation that doesn't support ACS line |
| drawing. With a Unicode font, try setting PuTTY to use a different translation |
| on the Window -> Translation configuration page. For example, change UTF-8 to |
| ISO-8859-1 or CP437. It may also be necessary to adjust the way PuTTY treats |
| line drawing characters in the lower part of the same configuration page. |
| |
| * What is the best way to display the load average? Why no #L? |
| |
| It isn't possible to get the load average portably in code and it is preferable |
| not to add portability goop. The following works on at least Linux, *BSD and OS |
| X: |
| |
| uptime|awk '{split(substr($0, index($0, "load")), a, ":"); print a[2]}' |
| |
| * How do I attach the same session to multiple clients but with a different |
| current window, like screen -x? |
| |
| One or more of the windows can be linked into multiple sessions manually with |
| link-window, or a grouped session with all the windows can be created with |
| new-session -t. |
| |
| * Ctrl and arrow keys doesn't work in putty! What do I do? |
| |
| putty inverts the sense of the cursor key mode on ctrl, which is a bit hard for |
| tmux to detect properly. To get ctrl keys right, change the terminfo settings |
| so kUP5 (Ctrl-Up etc) are the adjusted versions, and disable smkx/rmkx so tmux |
| doesn't change the mode. For example with this line in .tmux.conf (assuming you |
| have TERM set to xterm): |
| |
| set -g terminal-overrides "xterm*:kLFT5=\eOD:kRIT5=\eOC:kUP5=\eOA:kDN5=\eOB:smkx@:rmkx@" |
| |
| Note that this will only work in tmux 1.2 and above. |
| |
| * How can I blank the tmux window? |
| |
| GNU screen has a feature whereby it will blank the screen after a period of |
| inactivity. To do the same thing in tmux, use the lock-command setting, for |
| example (with GNU bash): |
| |
| set -g lock-command 'tput civis && read -s -n1' |
| |
| This will remove the cursor and tell the shell to quit once a key has been |
| pressed. For zsh, use "read -s -k1". |
| |
| In addition, it's possible to have both blanking and locking (for instance via |
| lock(1) or vlock(1)) by using the following: |
| |
| bind x set lock-command '/usr/bin/vlock' \; lock-client \; set lock-command 'tput civis && read -s -n1' |
| |
| * How can I open a new window in the same directory as the current window? |
| |
| One option is to just run "TMUX= tmux" in the window. However, this only works if no |
| command is running, so that you can input the command. |
| |
| A workaround is to let tmux know about the current path through an environment |
| variable. To do so, use the following command: |
| |
| [ -n "$TMUX" ] && tmux setenv TMUXPWD_$(tmux display -p "#I") $PWD |
| |
| Which sets TMUXPWD_i (where i is the number of the current window) to the path |
| of the current directory. This command can be added to PS1, for example: |
| |
| PS1='$([ -n "$TMUX" ] && tmux setenv TMUXPWD_$(tmux display -p "#I") $PWD)\h$ ' |
| |
| When a new window is created, the shell should be asked to change |
| directory. You can define a new binding (for example, if using GNU bash): |
| |
| bind-key C-c run-shell 'tmux neww "cd $(tmux display -p "\$TMUXPWD_#I"); exec bash"' |
| |
| This solution will work even if a command is currently running in the terminal, |
| but it will not work from a window that has just been swapped with another |
| because TMUXPWD_i will not be updated after a swap. However, once a new prompt |
| is displayed, TMUXPWD_i is updated properly. |
| |
| * tmux doesn't start with "daemon failed" |
| |
| tmux shows something similar to this when started: |
| |
| fatal: server_start: daemon failed: No such file or directory |
| fatal: main_dispatch: imsg_read failed |
| |
| A possible reason is that /dev/null is not a character device or is otherwise |
| inaccessible. |
| |
| Check with: |
| |
| file /dev/null |
| ls -l /dev/null |
| |
| If it is not a character device or has incorrect permissions, it can typically |
| be recreated with: |
| |
| cd /dev && rm null && ./MAKEDEV null |
| |
| * vim or $otherprogram displays reverse video instead of italics, even though |
| tmux displays italics just fine in the status line. What's wrong? |
| |
| Screen's terminfo description lacks italics mode and has standout mode in its |
| place. To make applications aware that tmux supports italics, you'll need to |
| create a new terminfo file with modified smso, rmso, sitm and ritm entries: |
| |
| $ mkdir $HOME/.terminfo/ |
| $ screen_terminfo="screen" |
| $ infocmp "$screen_terminfo" | sed \ |
| -e 's/^screen[^|]*\|[^,]*,/screen-it|screen with italics support,/' \ |
| -e 's/smso=[^,]*,/smso=\\E[7m,/' \ |
| -e 's/rmso=[^,]*,/rmso=\\E[27m,/' \ |
| -e '$s/$/ sitm=\\E[3m, ritm=\\E[23m,/' > /tmp/screen.terminfo |
| $ tic /tmp/screen.terminfo |
| |
| And tell tmux to use it in ~/.tmux.conf: |
| |
| set -g default-terminal "screen-it" |
| |
| If your terminal supports 256 colors, use: |
| |
| $ screen_terminfo="screen-256color" |
| |
| instead of "screen". See the FAQ entry about 256 colors support for more info. |
| Also note that tmux will still display reverse video on terminals that do not |
| support italics. |
| |
| $Id: FAQ,v 1.42 2011-04-11 07:14:54 nicm Exp $ |