Tmux session management

When using Tmux, I try to follow these rules:

• create a named session for each project and long running process.
• create a window for each task in the session.
• create a pane for closely related actions of each task.
• each window should not include more than 2 panes.

I have written a session-finder Bash script that utilises fzf to quickly find and create new sessions and switch between them by typing only a few characters of their name. A new session is created if no matching session is found. Example sessions are irc clients, ssh, vpn, and proxy connections.

A problem I encountered when writing session-finder was that fzf returned exit status 0 even when no match was found. I came up with a simple workaround. I passed --print-query to fzf and counted the printed lines. When there is a match fzf prints:

<query>
<selected line>

And when there is no match:

<query>

It would have been simpler if fzf returned a non-zero exit status when no match is found.

Update: I opened an issue and requested for non-zero exit status, and @junegunn implemented it very quickly. It will be available from 0.10.6.

Back to the session-finder. Here is an example of how my session-finder looks like:

11 named sessions, 2 windows in the current session.

fuzzy session finder and creator.

In this screenshot, there are 11 sessions, “tmux”, “appa”, “crystal” etc. The hover image shows what happens when finder is started is called. I typed l to filter sessions whose name contains this letter. Below is a list of all available sub-commands.

Print a pretty list of session names to be used by status-left:

bash session-finder.bash status

Start fzf and find or create sessions:

bash session-finder.bash finder

Switch to the last session:

bash session-finder.bash last

Switch to the next session:

bash session-finder.bash next

Switch to the previous session:

bash session-finder.bash prev