Tmux – Interactive Search of Sessions

bsdcommand linecommand-line-toollinuxtmux

When switching between tmux sessions with the interactive session menu (<prefix>-s), you can jump to a specific session by typing the session's numeric or alphabetical index, e.g.

(0) + first_session: 1 windows (1) + second_session: 2 windows (2) + third_session: 1 windows (3) + secret_session: 1 windows

Pressing 1 will open up the second_session session.

I often have >20 tmux sessions open and I'd like to have a way to search without looking at the whole list. Is there a way to change the behaviour to have an interactive search? That is, I would like to type sec and have the list narrow to

(1) + second_session: 2 windows (3) + secret_session: 1 windows

I've googled quite a bit and found nothing; is this behaviour possible?

Best Answer

Yes it is, but as far as i know you'll need an extra tool for the searching itself. I'm using fzf for the (fuzzy) searching. Once fzf is installed you can use the following config to set up the session switching with search:

bind C-j split-window -v "tmux list-sessions | sed -E 's/:.*$//' | grep -v \"^$(tmux display-message -p '#S')\$\" | fzf --reverse | xargs tmux switch-client -t"

I didn't figure this out myself but took this from Chris Toomey's public tmux conf.

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Tmux – How to Find Which Tmux Session a Process Belongs To

lsof /path/to/.file.swp will show the process ID of the offending vim process. If you want to write a script, use pid=$(lsof -Fp "$swp_file"); pid=${pid#p} to get just the process ID.

Then ps 12345 where 12345 is the process ID will show some information about the process, in particular what tty it's running on (ps -o tty= -p $pid in a script). The tty uniquely identifies a tmux window (assuming the process is running inside tmux), but I don't know how to go from the tty name to the tmux session.

What would give you the tmux session is the value of the TMUX environment variable in the vim process. The session number is the last number, after the last comma.

Most unices have a way to find out the environment of a process, but the way differs between unix variants. On Linux, you can use </proc/$pid/environ grep -z '^TMUX=' to show the value of $TMUX in process $pid, so you can extract the session number as $(</proc/$pid/environ grep -z '^TMUX=' | sed 's/.*,//').

How to Spawn an SSH-Agent for a New tmux Session

OK I've done some more digging around and I should be able to easily hook to whatever SSH_AGENT is around when the terminal is attached. tmux already provides the key configuration "update-environment" however the missing piece is existing shells are not magically updated. However tmux does track the environment variables updated so the update script is a lot less hacky than screens:


# Sync the environment of an existing shell
#
#  tmux already updates the environment according to
#  the update-environment settings in the config. However
#  for existing shells you need to sync from from tmux's view
#  of the world.
function tmux_sync_env
{
    external_env=`tmux showenv | grep -v "^-"`
    export ${external_env}
}

From this commit

Best Answer

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Tmux – How to Find Which Tmux Session a Process Belongs To

How to Spawn an SSH-Agent for a New tmux Session

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