Tmux settings and usage

Tmux is a terminal software for multi-windows.

Tmux basic commands

Prefix: ^B

Short screen copy and paste has no difference with that in uxterm.

Long screen copy and paste

Default

^B + [ to enter copy mode
select and quit copy mode
Use ^B + ] to paste

Use vi-copy mode

Add the lines into ~/.zshrc

export EDITOR=vim
export VISUAL="$EDITOR"

Now you can use Space to start selection, Enter to end selection and q to quit copy mode.

To system clipboard

For XTerm, add this line into ~/.Xresources to enable:

xterm*disallowedWindowOps: 20,21,SetXprop

Now, you can use ^B + [ to enter copy mode, vi style to select and copy.Then go to anywhere to paste.

An experiment of autostart tmux service under systemd

[Unit]
Description=Start tmux in detached session

[Service]
Type=forking
User=%I
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tmux new-session -s %u -d
ExecStop=/usr/bin/tmux kill-session -t %u

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Taking care of multi-user.target, a target is used for starting a group of units. That is to say, when starting a target, all units in this target will be started by systemd. We can check all the units included in multi-user.target by systemctl list-dependencies multi-user.target

We can see that almost every autostart service set by our own user is included in multi-user.target. So this is an important systemd target that is run default when starting Linux.

Then create and edit the file /etc/systemd/system/tmux@.service

[Unit]
Description=Start tmux in detached session

[Service]
Type=forking
User=%I
ExecStart=/usr/bin/tmux new-session -s %u -d
ExecStop=/usr/bin/tmux kill-session -t %u

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable and start user service:

systemctl enable tmux@shane.service
systemctl start tmux@shane.service

References

1. Scroll shell output with mouse in tmux: https://superuser.com/questions/210125/scroll-shell-output-with-mouse-in-tmux
2. Tmux tutorial: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Getting-Started#copy-and-paste