Last night at Vim London I spoke about some of my favourite plugins and settings for Tmux and Vim that allow me to work with them as I do. It’s very rare these days that I won’t be editing code from Vim, within a Tmux session, but out of the box the immediate advantages of this pairing are not always obvious. It takes some time to get things working.

The talk was recorded and I will update the post with it once it’s public, but for now I just wanted to link to some of the plugins and settings I mentioned in the talk that I use in my dotfiles.

tnew alias

I create all my tmux sessions through an alias I have which I’ve called tnew, which simply calls a function called new-tmux-from-dir-name (this is taken from the thoughbot dotfiles. The function looks like so:

sh function new-tmux-from-dir-name { tmux new-session -As `basename $PWD` }

This does two things: – when you create a new session, it names it based on the directory name – if you are in a directory that already has a tmux session associated, tnew will attach you back into the already existing session

Tmux + OS X, pbcopy

By default tmux on OS X breaks the pbcopy command. I’m not going to go into details, but thankfully Chris Johnsen’s fix

has detailed instructions on how to get that functionality back, and it’s not too tricky either.

Renumber windows

Out of the box, if you have 3 tmux windows numbered 0, 1, 2 and then you delete the one numbered ‘1’, you’re left with two windows: 0, and 2.… Click Here

I often like to change the background from light to dark or vice-versa depending on my environment. I use the Solarized theme and it comes with two lovely variants, light and dark.

I used to do this by manually entering:

:set background=light

But why do that when it’s easy to set up a mapping to toggle them automatically for you:

map <Leaderbg :let &background = ( &background == "dark"? "light" : "dark" )<CR

Now it’s a simple case of ,bg (I have my leader set to ,) to toggle the background.

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