Title: Organize your console with tmuxinator

	Title: Organize your console with tmuxinator
	Author: Solène
	Date: 17 May 2024
	Tags: unix terminal portoftheweek
	Description: In this article, you will learn about the program
	tmuxinator to automate your console sessions

	# Introduction

	This article is about the program tmuxinator, a tool to script the
	generation of tmux sessions from a configuration file.

	tmuxinator official project website on GitHub

	This program is particularly useful when you have repeated tasks to
	achieve in a terminal, or if you want to automate your tmux session to
	save your fingers from always typing the same commands.

	tmuxinator is packaged in most distributions and requires tmux to work.

	# Configuration

	tmuxinator requires a configuration file for each "session" you want to
	manage with it. It provides a command line parameter to generate a
	file from a template:

	```shell
	$ tmuxinator new name_here
	```

	By default, it will create the yaml file for this project in
	`$HOME/.config/tmuxinator/name_here.yml`, if you want the project file
	to be in a directory (to make it part of a versioned project
	repository?), you can add the parameter `--local`.

	# Real world example

	Here is a tmuxinator configuration file I use to automatically do the
	following tasks, the commands include a lot of monitoring as I love
	watching progress and statistics:

	* update my ports tree using git before any other task
	* run a script named dpb.sh
	* open a shell and cd into a directory
	* run an infinite loop displaying ccache statistics
	* run an infinite loop displaying a MFS mount point disk usage
	* display top
	* display top for user _pbuild

	I can start all of this using `tmuxinator start dpb`, or stop only
	these "parts" of tmux with `tmuxinator stop dpb` which is practical
	when using tmux a lot.

	Here is my file `dpb.yml`:

	```yml
	name: dpb
	root: ~/

	# Runs on project start, always
	on_project_start: cd /usr/ports && doas -u solene git pull -r

	windows:
	- dpb:
	layout: tiled
	panes:
	- dpb:
	- cd /root/packages/packages
	- ./dpb.sh -P list.txt -R
	- watcher:
	- cd /root/logs
	- ls -altrh locks
	- date
	- while true ; do clear && env CCACHE_DIR=/build/tmp/pobj/.ccache/ ccac…
	- while true ; do df -h /build/tmp/pobj_mfs/ \| grep % ; sleep 10 ; done
	- top
	- top -U _pbuild
	```

	# Going further

	Tmuxinator could be used to ssh into remote servers, connect to IRC,
	open your email client, clean stuff, there are no limits.

	This is particularly easy to configure as it does not try to run
	commands, but only send the keys to each tmux panes, which mean it will
	send keystrokes like if you typed them. In the example above, you can
	see how the pane "dpb" can cd into a directory and then run a command,
	or how the pane "watcher" can run multiple commands and leave the shell
	as is.

	# Conclusion

	I knew about tmuxinator for a while, but I never gave it a try before
	this week. I really regret not doing it earlier. Not only it allows
	me to "script" my console usage, but I can also embed some development
	configuration into my repositories. While you can use it as an
	automation method, I would not rely too much on it though, it only
	types blindly on the keyboard.