5

Fuzzy-switching Tmux Sessions with Ease

 2 years ago
source link: https://jdhao.github.io/2021/11/20/tmux_fuzzy_session_switch/
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
neoserver,ios ssh client

Fuzzy-switching Tmux Sessions with Ease

2021-11-20358 words 2 mins read 15 times read

During my work, I use multiple Tmux sessions to manage different projects. When I create a new session, I usually give it unique name so that I know that the project is about via the session name.

switching between sessions – the basic way

Tmux has a builtin subcommand called choose-session. Initially, I add a key binding for this command in my .tmux.conf:

bind-key S choose-session

It works by showing a list of sessions, and you can switch between these sessions by using Ctrl-N and Ctrl-P.

One disadvantage with this method is that we can only switch between different session one at a time. When I have multiple sessions, switching between them is a pain.

fuzzy-switching sessions with fzf

A more advanced way is to use fzf to filter sessions by their name and then switch to the selected session.

First, we create a shell script ~/.tmux/tmux-switch-session.sh1:

#!/bin/bash
tmuxsessions=$(tmux list-sessions -F "#{session_name}")

tmux_switch_to_session() {
    session="$1"
    if [[ $tmuxsessions = *"$session"* ]]; then
        tmux switch-client -t "$session"
    fi
}

choice=$(sort -rfu <<< "$tmuxsessions" \
    | fzf-tmux \
    | tr -d '\n')
tmux_switch_to_session "$choice"

We need to give this script execution rights (solution found here):

chmod +x ~/.tmux/tmux-switch-session.sh

Otherwise, when trying to run this script using key bindings, we get the following error:

/home/jdhao/.tmux/tmux_switch_to_session returned 126

Then add the following config to tmux conf:

bind-key S run-shell -b "~/.tmux/tmux-switch-session.sh"

Note that -b option for run-shell subcommand is important, without which, tmux will stuck and freeze forever, see also this issue.

switching tmux sessions with menu

This post shows how to switch sessions using a menu, which is also cool.

First, we create a script ~/.tmux/session-menu (do not forget to give it execution rights):

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# See https://qmacro.org/autodidactics/2021/08/12/session-switching-with-the-tmux-menu/

tmux list-sessions -F '#S' \
  | awk 'BEGIN {ORS=" "} {print $1, NR, "\"switch-client -t", $1 "\""}' \
  | xargs tmux display-menu -T "Switch-session"

Then we create a key binding for it in tmux conf:

bind-key ` run-shell -b "~/.tmux/session-menu"

It will show a small menu for you to switch between different sessions. Pressing a number will switch to that session.

References

Author jdhao

LastMod 2021-11-21

License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Reward
事情经常是 Now or Never

report

Recommend

About Joyk


Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK