My original reasons for choosing tmux were that it supported both vertical and horizontal splits whereas GNU Screen only supported one of the two (which of them, I forget). It also had a more permissive BSD license, which I like more than GPL.

Allow switching the currently focused pane by mouse click.

setw -g mode-mouse on
set-option -g mouse-select-pane on

Set the title of the current window to something descriptive for the entire tmux session. This results in the current window being called "1. neon-vm:0.0.0 emacsclient justinlilly@neon-vm:~"

set-option -g set-titles on
set-option -g set-titles-string '#H:#S.#I.#P #W #T' # window number,program name, active(or not)

If a "bell" is used in any of the attached sessions, trigger a bell in the current window. Turn off the visual bell, instead opting for an audible bell.

set-option -g bell-action any
set-option -g visual-bell off

I prefer having my C-z as my default prefix. While it means I need to double-tap C-z for backgrounding a process, its much more accessible to my caps lock based ctrl key than B and doesn't interfere with emacs likes C-a does. Nested session? C-z z (the send-prefix command below) will send the inner session the prefix identifier.

set-option -g prefix C-z
unbind-key C-b
bind-key z send-prefix

Zero based indexing is awesome… in programming languages. I'd rather have tmux start at 1, as it preserves simple left-based ordering for windows.

set -g base-index 1

When a smaller terminal connects to a tmux client, it shrinks to fit it. The clients attached with bigger displays see this constrained view. aggressive-resize makes it such that the window is only resized if the smaller client is actively looking at it.

setw -g aggressive-resize on

Next are a bunch of options related to my status line. We enable the possibility for utf-8 characters in the status left and status right displays. The left side of the status line displays the hostname and the session number like "neon-vm:0 |". The right side shows a simple date and time. The center status line is centered such that it's distinct from the left and right.

set-option -g status-utf8 on
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-fg green
set -g status-left-length 15
set -g status-left ' #[fg=cyan,bright]#10H#[fg=green]:#[fg=white]#S#[fg=green] | #[default]'
set -g status-right '| #[fg=yellow]%y-%m-%d %H:%M '
set -g status-justify centre

By default, windows only keep 2000 lines of history. Let's increase that to 100k. Nothing worse than something important being JUST off of screen.

set -g history-limit 100000

Some nifty key bindings I've picked up here and there. I like the | and - variants which do window splits, which I picked up from . The S command will prompt for a hostname

bind-key r source-file ~/.tmux.conf
bind-key S command-prompt -p ssh: "new-window -n %1 'ssh %1'"
bind-key | split-window -h
bind-key - split-window -v

• Practical tmux
• Tmux manfile
• Randall Degges's post on tmux