Scripting tmux
In my day-to-day work, I find myself needing full mini-environments for several of the projects I work on. Frequently, I'll need to pop a handful of terminals and start various daemons or do environment prep for working in them.
In the past, after trying several things, I ended up using Applescript to
launch Terminal.app, pop tabs and load bits up. But I hated working with it,
it would frequently drop portions of the setup and was obviously
platform-specific. Since I had to setup a loaner laptop anyhow, it dawned on me
that I could use a terminal multiplexer instead. I had used
screen in the
past for administration bits but never really enjoyed it.
However, Alex turned me onto
tmux, a modern
BSD-licensed multiplexer. After poking at it for about a half hour, I was able
to duplicate and improve on everything I had before. Without further ado:
My .tmux.conf file looks like:
Then I created shell scripts to build the environments for me. In this case, to setup my Haystack dev environment, the script looks like:
I'm happy because it works beautifully, reads well and works under Mac OS X and Linux. There might be better ways but this is mine and I like it.