TITLE: tmux grouped sessions
DATE: 2023-09-23
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================


I have two monitors at work. Normally I have a terminal running
tmux open full screen on the right-hand monitor, in portrait, and
use the left monitor in landscape for everything else. Occasionally
however, I want to also have a terminal open on the left monitor,
and to move windows easily between terminals. To make it easier to
share windows across terminals, I have adjusted my tmux setup to
take advantage of the grouped-sessions feature.

At the bottom of my .tmux.conf I have this chunk, which starts a
new session called "main", as a daemon.

   new-session -s main -d

Then, at the bottom of my .bashrc I have this chunk. First it
checks if tmux is already running (if [ -z "$TMUX" ]). Then if tmux
isn't running, it creates a new session within the same group as
session "main" (new-session -t main). It then sets the option
destroy-unnattached, which removes clients when you detach from
them, ensuring that the automatically created sessions don't pile
up when they are detached from.

   if [ -z "$TMUX" ]; then
       /usr/local/bin/tmux new-session -t main \; set-option
destroy-unattached
   fi

The result is that when I open a terminal, tmux checks if the
"main" session exists, creates it if it doesn't and attaches a
client to that session.

All sessions in the same group share the same set of windows, but
you can move freely between windows in each session.

{{< video src="/vid/tmux_sessions/tmux_sessions.mp4" >}}

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