How to rename a session in tmux

renametmux

When I first started using tmux, I didn't give my first session a name. Then, as I started creating different sessions for different tasks (work, play, etc), I started naming my sessions.

Now I have a bunch of different sessions, but the first one doesn't have a name. How can I name (or rename) it, both from within tmux and from a shell prompt?

Best Answer

From within tmux

Short way: prefix, then dollar sign:

Ctrl + B, $

Long way: prefix, then colon:

Ctrl + B, :

Then type this command at the prompt:

rename-session [-t current-name] [new-name]

If the current session name (-t current-name) is not specified, the currently attached session will be renamed.

By default the session name will be in brackets in the lower left corner of tmux. You can list all sessions and switch between them with:

Ctrl + B, s

From shell prompt

You can rename tmux sessions with

tmux rename-session [-t current-name] [new-name]

To find your session names, do tmux list-sessions -- it will be in the left-most column.

If the current session name (-t current-name) is not specified, the most recently used session will be renamed.

Related Solutions

Tmux: sharing current window title (#T) from within nested tmux sessions

I did some digging and found the answer for myself. Well, the way I have found to accomplish my gaol is not elegant, but it will work to get the job done.

First, you need to have the "set-titles" option turned on in your .tmux.conf file. As well as the appropriate title string:

set -g set-titles on
set -g set-titles-string '#T'

However, if you implement this, you will immediately notice that it doesn't work. The problem is that this only sends the title string up stream if it starts in an xterm variant (tmux/screen TERM variable is "screen*"). So, when starting a nested tmux session, you must fool the terminal by resetting the variable. The following example will keep the TERM suffix (e.g. "-256color").

TEMP_TERM=$TERM
TEMP_TERM_SUFFIX=${TERM#$(echo $TERM | cut -f 1 -d'-')}
TERM="xterm${TEMP_TERM_SUFFIX}"

I am not sure if it matters, but I think it is smart to reset TERM back after closing tmux (so save it into a temp variable). Using this, a simple shell script can be made to open a nested tmux session that sends the #T title variable upstream to it's parent sessions.

This all works, but is somewhat of a pain considering that work must be done to ensure infinite nesting loops aren't created in the event that we automatically start our shell up in tmux. If anyone has a better solution I would love to here it as well!

Tmux – shortcut not responding

Thanks to @ccxCZ on #tmux@freenode.net, I could find what was the problem.

Using the following:

tmux show-options -g | grep prefix

Showed me that the prefix was:

prefix `

Testing it, it was indeed this. I don't know how it turned out this way.

Since my tmux.conf was right, I just had to do:

tmux source /etc/tmux.conf

And the prefix was set back to the right way.