Tmux Status-Bar

The tmux status bar can be a handy tool to remind yourself where you are within tmux. It can also include a bunch of system information like battery status, cpu, mem, whatever you can get from the command line. Honestly I like to keep it minimal, and actually keep it turned off most of the time. I find that it helps a little bit for others to follow along if I keep it on in certain circumstances.

show the status bar

You can set a hotkey to show or hide the status bar.

        
bind s set-option -g status
bind C-s set-option -g status

setting the background transparent

I really want a minimal status bar with very little bling, I want it to get out of the way an not draw too much attention, so step one is to set the background to transparent.

        
# default statusbar colors
#――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
set-option -g status-bg default
set-option -g status-fg colour240

setting default colors

I want my status bar to somewhat match the rest of my theme, so I set the default foreground as magenta and the default background as transparent.

        
# default window title colors
#―――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
set-window-option -g window-status-style fg=magenta
set-window-option -g window-status-style bg=default

my status bar

Honestly I set this up quite awhile ago, and it does everything I need it to for now. It shows me the current session that I am in on the left and lists out the windows for the session in the middle.

        
set -g status-left-length 85
set -g status-left "working on#[fg=colour135] #S"
set -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│#[fg=white bg=cyan]#W#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│"
set -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│#[fg=colour135 bg=black]#W#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│"
set -g status-style bg=default
set -g status-right "#[fg=magenta] #[bg=gray] %b %d %Y %l:%M %p"
set -g status-right '#(gitmux "#{pane_current_path}")'
set -g status-justify centre

For more format options search for FORMATS in the tmux manpage.

tmux-nav-2021

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.