Tmux Plugins You Should Use

Posted on June 11, 2017

Plenty has been written about Tmux, so I won’t bore you with any of those details. This post is about the existence of Tmux’s plugin ecosystem. It’s great, and I will encourage you to start using it if you haven’t already.

Tmux Plugin Manager (tpm)

Installing tpm is our first step towards using plugins with Tmux. From the README:

git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm

and add the following to the bottom of .tmux.conf:

# List of plugins
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tpm'
# basic tmux settings everyone can agree on 
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-sensible'

# Initialize TMUX plugin manager (keep this line at the very bottom of tmux.conf)
run '~/.tmux/plugins/tpm/tpm'

Then reload the config with tmux source ~/.tmux.conf.

This is similar to the install/config/workflow for plugins in VIM.

As noted in the README, there are a few forms one can use to list the plugins in the tmux config:

# set -g @plugin 'github_username/plugin_name'
# set -g @plugin 'git@github.com/user/plugin'
# set -g @plugin 'git@bitbucket.com/user/plugin'

Installing Plugins

Once you have added plugins to .tmux.conf, you’ll want to instruct tpm to install those plugins: prefix + I (install) to fetch.

By default, plugins are installed into ~/.tmux/plugins/

Plugins on Github

There is a tmux-plugins org on github with various curated plugins worth reviewing.

The two plugins I highly recommend are:

tmux-continuum: Continuous saving of tmux environment.
tmux-resurrect: Persists tmux environment across system restarts.

Sensible, CopyCat, Yank, and Logging are all worth a quick review as well.

Goodluck and have fun!