Binding a tmux key to multiple commands

tmux

I launch multipane tmux window to monitor several server parameters.
With Ctrl-S I can open a new window with another monitor command.

Now I want to bind Ctrl-Q to open another multipane window with several monitors. How do I bind a key to multiple commands?
I tried chaining them with ; and \; – nothing helps. Please, advise what should I use instead of … below.

Is it possible when I open a new window to suspend the background commands overlapped by it?

    tmux new-session "monitor1" \;\
            split-window -v "monitor2" \;\
            select-pane -U \;\
            split-window -v -h -p 60 "monitor3" \;\
            bind-key -n C-s new-window "monitor4" \;\
            bind-key -n C-q "..."

Best Answer

Todd Freed is right, the "correct" way to do this is using \;. Sort of. But there's a snag.

You see, you join a sequence of tmux commands together by giving tmux the conjunction ;. Thus, in a file sourced by tmux, you might say

new-session "monitor1" ; split-window -v "monitor2"

if, for some reason, you wanted that all on one line. Now, you can give that one-line compound statement to the tmux command from a shell also but the ; must be escaped so that the shell interprets it as another argument for tmux. Thus the equivalent of the above from the shell is

$ tmux new-session "monitor1" \; split-window -v "monitor2"

Similarly, the tmux bind-key command takes a series of arguments which are the tmux command and arguments to run when the key is pressed. If you wanted to bind C-q to the above sequence from inside a file sourced by tmux, you'd say

bind-key -n C-q new-session "monitor1" \; split-window -v "monitor2"

Here we've escaped the ; from tmux, so that tmux doesn't interpret it as the end of the bind-key command, but as another argument to bind-key telling it to form a compound command as the bound value of the C-q key.

So what happens when we want to make tmux do that from the shell? A whole lot of escaping.

$ tmux bind-key -n C-q new-session "monitor1" \\\; split-window -v "monitor2"

First, we have to escape the \ and the ; each from the shell, causing the shell to pass the two characters \; as an argument to tmux. This then escapes the ; from tmux, causing it to assign the entire compound statement as the binding of C-q.

Now, all that said, if you use a complex tmux setup like this repeatedly, I'd suggest that you create a tmux file to keep it in:

# In split-windows.tmux:
new-session "monitor1"
split-window -v "monitor2"
bind-key -n C-s new-window "monitor4"
# ...etc...

And then:

$ tmux source split-windows.tmux  # (or even make an alias for this)

It'll be a lot easier to maintain that way.

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