Tmux & Ghostty

In my quest for better productivity, I stumbled upon Tmux, particularly after watching Theo’s video about his tools. I installed it and started learning, but I found it incredibly confusing. I eventually gave up. In my defense, I was quite busy at the time, and trying to learn Tmux while also developing didn’t seem like the best approach. However…

Network Chuck’s video on Tmux reignited my motivation to learn it properly, once and for all. It turned out to be much easier than I initially thought, especially with Chuck’s clear explanations. I’ve been using it for two months now, and I can’t imagine working without it.

I use Tmux with Ghostty, which makes the setup even more interesting. I also use oh-my-tmux, which provides a clean and simple yet powerful configuration.

While using Ghostty, I wanted a Tmux session to start automatically as soon as I launched the terminal. Ghostty didn’t offer a direct way to do this, so I created a simple script:

~/.config/ghostty/config

font-family = "Geist Mono"
window-decoration = false
background-opacity = 0.80
background=#1a1c1c
command=/home/anar/Music/anar/scripts/ghostty-tmux.sh
keybind=ctrl+shift+w=close_window
confirm-close-surface=false

The command setting in my Ghostty config executes the following script:

#!/bin/bash

SESSION_NAME="ghostty"

# Check if the session already exists
tmux has-session -t $SESSION_NAME 2>/dev/null

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  # If the session exists, reattach to it
  tmux attach-session -t $SESSION_NAME
else
  # If the session doesn't exist, start a new one
  tmux new-session -s $SESSION_NAME -d
  tmux attach-session -t $SESSION_NAME
fi

This script checks for an existing Tmux session named “ghostty.” If the session exists, it attaches to it. If not, it creates a new session with that name. It works perfectly and is exactly what I needed.

For now, I’ll stick with this development environment. It works well, and I prefer to master one environment inside and out rather than constantly switching to new tools every few months.