Ubuntu – How to change the default shell used in Byobu (tmux)

Byobu 5.x has excellent support for tmux. New installations of Byobu 5.x and above will default to using tmux as the backend. Upgrades from older versions, however, will not automatically make that switch.

Still, you can manually run byobu with tmux by typing byobu-tmux. Similarly, you can manually choose to run with the screen backend by typing byobu-screen.

Running byobu will launch with your selected default backend. You can choose between tmux and screen by running byobu-select-backend.

kirkland@ubuntu:~$ byobu-select-backend 

Select the byobu backend:
  1. tmux
  2. screen

Choose 1-2 [1]: 1

Not easily, no. Unfortunately, tmux only supports a single status line at a time. That's a function of tmux, and not byobu.

What you can do, however, is configure multiple status lines and cycle through them using shift-F5. You'll only be able to see one at a time, but you can cycle through them with a single keystroke.

You can define and customize these in your ~/.byobu/status file. Here's a snippet:

# Tmux has one status line, with 2 halves for status
# You can have as many tmux right lines below here, and cycle through them using Shift-F5
#tmux_right="network #disk_io custom #entropy raid reboot_required updates_available #apport #services #mail users uptime #ec2_cost #rcs_cost #fan_speed #cpu_temp battery wifi_quality #processes load_average cpu_count cpu_freq memory #swap #disk #whoami #hostname ip_address #time_utc date time"
#tmux_right="#network disk_io #custom entropy #raid #reboot_required #updates_available #apport #services #mail #users #uptime #ec2_cost #rcs_cost fan_speed cpu_temp #battery #wifi_quality #processes #load_average #cpu_count #cpu_freq #memory #swap whoami hostname ip_address #time_utc disk date time"
tmux_left=" logo #distro release #arch"
tmux_right=" network disk_io custom entropy raid reboot_required updates_available #apport #services #mail users uptime #ec2_cost #rcs_cost fan_speed cpu_temp battery wifi_quality #processes load_average cpu_count cpu_freq memory #swap #disk #whoami #hostname ip_address #time_utc date time"