tm - tmux manager / helper

This is the second version of my tmux helper tm, used to ease my day-to-day work with tmux. It is a rewrite in Rust, as I want to learn more Rust. Accidentally that made it much faster too, which is nice.

The rewrite is intended to be, as much as possible, a drop-in replacement for the old shell version, so any usual tm s or tm ms usage should work right away, as well as the usual config files (see status for how much is implemented). Still, there might be breakage, some known ones are mentioned at the end of this document. Feel free to open an issue, if you notice more.

Silly badges

Usage

tm still tries to support both commandline styles that the shell script did, that is it can both do the "subcommand" style (traditional) as well as "getopts" style of old tm.

Documentation

A way more detailed documentation is written in "mdbook" style, available at tmbook.

Status

• Commandline parsing
• Attach to existing sessions
  • Attach to existing, but "grouped" (separate window config)
• ls - list sessions
• s - create new session, open SSH directly to one or more hosts, many windows
• ms - create new session, open SSH directly to one or more hosts, one window with many panes, synchronized input.
• k - kill session
• -n - Open sessions to same hosts as existing session instead of just attaching to that existing session
• Support same environment variables as shell tm (supports any now)
• Simple config files (no ending)
  • Allows LIST command, recursively
  • Support ++TMREPLACETM++
• Extended config files (.cfg ending)

Installation

How to build

You need Rust on your machine, installation of that is described at Rust Install.

Git clone this repository, afterwards Cargo, the Rust Package manager, will help you along, cargo build --release should suffice to install all needed Rust packages and build a binary. Output file will be target/release/tm.

Pre-build binaries

If you trust Github Actions, you can download a binary built using them at the releases page. One is for Apple (entirely untested, I do not own such a machine. It compiles, so we ship it...), two are for Linux. One of them links against glibc (linux-gnu), one uses musl and is fully statically linked. No functional difference, the musl one will work even on older Linux releases, the glibc one may require a more recent glibc installed.

(Possibly Breaking) notable changes compared to old shell version

While the rewrite is intended to be as much as possible compatible to the shell variant from earlier, this is not entirely possible. Shell is a bit different environment after all, and some things that work there, for whatever reason, just don't work when using a compiled binary now, as they depend on shell internal behaviour.

The following is a (possibly) incomplete list of known behaviour changes.

LIST commands using ssh possibly requiring pseudo-terminal

Some commands (eg. sudo can be configured for this) may require a pseudo-terminal or they refuse work. Add -tt to the ssh commandline to force allocation of one.

LIST commands in simple config files

The LIST commands in simple config files need to be checked for correct quoting. Example:

Broken

LIST ssh -tt TARGETHOST sudo /usr/sbin/gnt-instance list --no-headers -o name --filter '("nsb" in tags and "prod" in tags) and admin_state == "up"'

Fixed

LIST ssh -tt TARGETHOST "sudo /usr/sbin/gnt-instance list --no-headers -o name --filter '(\"nsb\" in tags and \"prod\" in tags) and admin_state == \"up\"'"