Introduction
Getting started
Your first session
Working with panes
1. Creating panes
2. Navigating panes
Terminating panes and windows
Navigating sessions and windows
Moving forward
My config file

Introduction

Since you will be working on multiple machines, you will need a really good terminal multiplexer. I highly recommend tmux. tmux is already installed on the class server (netsec-01.csse.rose-hulman.edu), but if you’d like to install it locally, then any package manager would do (apt, snap, brew, etc.).

Getting started

tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows to arrange multiple windows and panes within one terminal window. This will prove very useful when debugging across several virtual machines in the labs for this class.

Some definitions

Below are some definitions ported and modified from the tmux official guide.

Pane: Contains a single terminal window and running program, appear in one window.
Window: Groups one or more panes together, linked to one or more sessions.
Session: Groups one or more windows together.

Normally, you start by creating a session, which automatically creates a window with a single pane. Then you can start adding panes to the same window, adding windows to the same session, or creating new sessions altogether.

The prefix key

Once in a tmux session, all what you type is sent directly to the terminal running in the active pane. However, the magic of tmux comes from controlling the multiplexer itself.

To indicate that you want to interact with the tmux multiplexer, you need to press a specific key combination. That is referred to as the prefix key!

By default, the prefix key is <C-b>, which means that you press both the Ctrl key and the b key. Pressing the prefix key means that you are now entering tmux communication mode, and keys you press after that will be sent to the multiplexer itself.

I prefer to use <C-q> as my prefix key, so I remap it in my configuration file. See that config file section below for more information.

Warning

Since you will be using ssh a lot to access the class server, please resist the temptation to nest tmux sessions. By that we mean that you start a session on your local machine, then ssh into the server, and then start another session inside your local one.

That is bad for a multitude of reasons, and I don’t think it’s worth the pain of trying to deal with nested tmux sessions. If you feel up for it, there’s plenty of tutorials and discussions about it online. I personally frown upon nested tmux sessions.

Therefore, your normal workflow would be to ssh into the server, then start (or resume) a tmux session there.

Your first session

Create a session

So let’s get started. Login to the server and then start a tmux session as follows:

  $ tmux new -s my_first_session

This will drop you into a new tmux session called my_first_session (that’s why the s flag is there). You will notice that a green status bar appears at the bottom. This contains some useful information, you can see the full documentation of that bar in the official documentation.

Detach from the session

You can now run commands and do things just like you would do if you are running on your native terminal window. Let’s say you are done for now, but you don’t want to kill off your session, you want to save its state so that you can resume it later on.

To do so, you can detach from a tmux session. The session will keep running in the background and you can resume it at any time. Even better, if you have a long running process running in there, it will continue running in the background. So if for example, your code needs to run for an hour, you can do the following:

Start a tmux session.
Start the process.
Detach from the session.
Do other stuff for an hour.
Resume the session and your process would have completed execution. Even more, if your process spits out stuff to standard output, you will be able to see all of that in there!

Now that I have convinced how great that is, let’s detach from our session. To do so, hit the prefix key, followed by the d key. For example, if you’re still using the default prefix, then you need to hit <C-b> d.

You will notice that your session will close and will be sent to the background. You are now back in your native terminal window, and you can launch new sessions, or resume other ones.

Attach to a running session

Okay, now we would like to re-attach to the session we just closed. First, let’s check on the sessions that we have running. To do so, you can use the following:

  $ tmux ls
  csse132: 1 windows (created Sat Nov 25 10:36:34 2023)
  csse332: 2 windows (created Mon Nov 20 22:23:16 2023)
  my_first_session: 1 windows (created Sat Nov 25 23:12:09 2023)

You can see that in my output, I have three sessions:

One for csse132. It has one window.
Another for csse332. It has two windows.
A third, my_first_session, which is the one we just created.

To resume the session you want, simply use:

  $ tmux at -t my_first_session

The -t flag allows you to specify the name of the session you’d like to resume. After issuing this command, you will be back in your tmux session and you can resume where you left off, with your history and your standard output preserved, as well as your current directory, running programs, open files, etc.

{.highlight} A useful feature is that tmux does pattern matching when looking for a session by name. So for example, for the above, I could have used tmux at -t my_f and tmux would recognize that I am looking for my_first_session.

Working with panes

Okay now that we have a session with its window, you can create panes to do things across instances of your terminal, and eventually across several machines via ssh.

Creating panes

There are two main ways to create panes:

Horizontally: This will split your current pane into two horizontally. By default, the new pane will appear on the right of your current pane.
Vertically: This will split your current pane into two vertically. By default, the new pane will appear on the left of your current pane.

Go ahead and give it a try within your my_first_session session. Here are the key combinations to do:

Hit <prefix> % to split horizontally.
Hit <prefix> " to split vertically.

Recall that <prefix> stands for your prefix key, which is C-b by default (or C-q if you use my config).

Navigating panes

To move from one page to another, simply use <prefix> <arrow key> to move in the desired direction. For example:

<prefix> -> will move to the pane on the right of the active pane.
<prefix> <- will move to the pane on the left of the active pane.

You get the gist, same works for up and down arrow keys.

Note that these movement keys wrap around, so moving down if there’s nothing below will wrap around to the one on top.

In my config file, I remapped these combinations to use vim-like movement. So for example, <prefix> l moves right, <prefix> h moves left, <prefix> k moves up, and <prefix> j moves down. This keeps my fingers at the same location on the keyboard (because I’m lazy!)

If you hit <prefix> q, numbers will show on your panes with your active one highlighted. If you press the corresponding number before the numbers disappear, you will be moved to the pane with that number you entered.

Terminating panes and windows

If you are done with a pane or window, simply kill the terminal running in that pane or window, that will cause that pane or window to die out. If you exit the last window running in a session, that session will be terminated as well.

If for some reason, your session hangs and you cannot kill it, you can ask tmux to do it for you. From another terminal window, use:

  $ tmux kill-session -t my_first_session

Navigating sessions and windows

If you have multiple sessions or windows, you can use this nice trick to move between them.

Hit <prefix> s, this will drop you into a small menu from which you can choose which one of your sessions you would like to switch to. You can also see a preview of what is going on in that session to help you find out which one you need.

Also, each session will have a nested list of all its windows, so you can move to a specific window of a specific session by expanding that session’s window list and selecting the appropriate window.

Moving forward

This is just a glimpse of what tmux can do, to get you started and get your feet wet with navigating windows and panes. The more you master tmux, the easier the labs will get!

The official tmux repository has a wonderful kickstart guide that goes a bit further than what we go through here. Take a look at it here.

My config file

Just like any other tool, you can customize tmux to your desires. Below, I have pasted my config file for your reference, feel free to use it or edit it as you see fit.

To set up your config file, simply place your configuration options in a file called .tmux.conf under your home directory. In other words, vim ~/.tmux.conf, add your options, save and exit. Reload tmux and you will be good to go!

# support colors with modern terminal emulators.
set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

# vi key-mappings
set -g mode-keys vi

# only use the option below if you use zshell, if you're on bash, don't need it
# set-option -g default-shell /bin/zsh

# enable mouse scrolling in history.
set -g mouse on

# change the prefix key to C-q
set -g prefix C-q
unbind C-a
bind C-q send-prefix

# vim splits like switching
bind h select-pane -L
bind j select-pane -D
bind k select-pane -U
bind l select-pane -R

# vim-like copy and paste in copy mode (for macosx)
bind P paste-buffer
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-selection
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi r send-keys -X rectangle-toggle

# If above doesn't work on linux, comment them out and use these ones!
# bind-key -t vi-copy 'v' begin-selection
# bind-key -t vi-copy 'y' copy-selection
# bind-key -t vi-copy 'r' rectangle-toggle

Table of contents