tmux-mate

Manage your tmux sessions with the delicious power of Dhall.

Motivation

Working on modern microservice architectures usually means spinning up various combinations of 5 or more different services. Remembering what they are is a totally 1x use of your time, let's automate it!

Getting started

# clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/danieljharvey/tmux-mate`

# enter the blessed folder
cd tmux-mate

# install tmux-mate using Haskell Stack (install instructions here: https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/install_and_upgrade/)
# this will put tmux-mate in your path
stack install

# run tmux-mate, passing it a path to your dhall config file
tmux-mate ./samples/Sample1.dhall

You should now see a tmux window running two infinite loops (that will soon wear your battery down, apologies). What if it turns out we need more things in our development environment?

# Run tmux-mate with the second sample script
tmux-mate ./samples/Sample2.dhall

You will now see your same session with an extra window added. tmux-mate has diffed the two sessions and added/removed the changes. This might seem like a useless optimization when running a trivial process like yes, but when running multiple build environments this saves loads of time.

Configuration

This project uses Dhall files for configuration. There are some examples in the /samples/ folders that demonstrate how to put one together. This is the schema:

{ sessionTitle : Text
, sessionWindows :
    List
      { windowTitle : Text
      , windowPanes : List { paneCommand : Text }
      , windowArrangement : Text
      }
}

A few rules

• All of the sessionTitle and windowTitle entries must be non-empty - they are used to manage the sessions internally.
• The session must contain at least one window, and each window must contain at least one pane.
• windowArrangement is one of tmux's options tiled, even-horizontal, even-vertical, main-horizontal and main-vertical. Info on what those mean in the man page - search for select-layout for info.

Options

Sometimes if what you expect to happen is not happening, pop in the -v (or --verbose) flag to see what tmux-mate is thinking.

Alternatively, to see what it's thinking without actually running the commands, then instead use -d (or --dry-run).

Requirements

You will need a recent version of tmux installed. I tested on version 3, but I'm pretty sure the commands I am using are pretty basic so should work backwards too.

Prior art

Very much inspired by Tmuxinator, a great project that doesn't quite do what I needed.