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Scripting tmux to open up specific applications can be intimidating your first
time. It can be tricky to get it to start in the right directory. If you are
trying to assign applictaions to a keybinding it can be easy to mess up and
have weird things happen every time your ~/.tmux.conf gets sourced.
Open htop in an above split
I used this one for a number of years to take a quick peek into my systems performance while a memory intensive task was running.
bind -n M-t split-window htop \; swap-pane -U
🗒️ note that the
swap-pane -Uwill make the htop split active immediately
Open htop in a popup
With the new tmux popup windows I really like the flow of just peeking at htop in a popup and jumping back into what I was doing. It can have a more consistennt look, and not mess with the window layouts.
bind -n M-t popup -E -h 95% -w 95% -x 100% "htop"
Open an applicaiton in the current directory
One thing that can be tricky is getting apps that need to be in a specific
directory started in the directory that you want. Here are two examples I use
to open vifm or gitui.
bind -n M-e split-window -c '#{pane_current_path}' vifm . .\; resize-pane -Z; bind C-k split-window -c '#{pane_current_path}' 'gitui'\; resize-pane -Z;
🗒️ note that
split-windowtakes in a -c flag before the application you want to run to specify the startup directory.
Open a popup in a specific directory
I've been converted over to using popups for these as well. I'll admit that the workflow of creating a new full screen window may have been better, but this can be a bit less jarring, espessially if you have anyone following along with what you are doing.
bind -n M-e display-popup -d '#{pane_current_path}' -E vifm bind C-k display-popup -d '#{pane_current_path}' -E 'gitui'
for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post
Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.