I do something quite similar except I break my session up by path. I rely on a script called tat from the wonderful folks at ThoughtBot.

I have this in my .zshrc file so that when I open a terminal, I’m kicked into a tmux session automatically:

# Add this to your zshrc or bzshrc file
_not_inside_tmux() { [[ -z "$TMUX" ]] }

ensure_tmux_is_running() {
  if _not_inside_tmux; then
    tat
  fi
}

ensure_tmux_is_running

And then when I navigate to a folder where I want a new session, I hit Ctrl-B which is defined in my .tmux.conf file to call tat again.

bind-key C-b send-keys "tat" "C-m"

This setup keeps me always in tmux but with sessions based on each project that I work on.

Edit to add: I forgot the most useful part of this! I have a tmux shortcut of C-j that opens a split showing me the other sessions. It uses fzf so that I can fuzzy match and switch among the sessions:

# Fuzzy matching session navigation via fzf utility
bind C-j split-window -v "tmux list-sessions | sed -E 's/:.*$//' | grep -v \"^$(tmux display-message -p '#S')\$\" | fzf --reverse | xargs tmux switch-client -t"

I like this a lot! I use fish so I translated the script from the post to fish syntax (with some modifications for personal opinion)

function tmux_chooser
  if test "$TMUX" != ""
    return
  end

  set session_count (tmux list-sessions | wc -l)
  set output_names (tmux list-sessions -F\#S)
  set i 1
  echo "Choose the session to attach: "
  for session in $output_names
    echo "  $i - $session"
    set i (math $i + 1)
  end
  echo "Or create a new session by entering a name for it"
  read -P '> ' input
  if test "$input" = ""
    tmux
  else if test "$input" = "nil"
    return
  else if begin ;
          string match -r '^[0-9]+$' "$input" > /dev/null ;
          and test "$input" -le "$session_count" ; end
    tmux a -t "$output_names[$input]"
  else
    tmux new -s "$input"
  end
end

I pretty much live in Emacs, and I’ve primarily used tmux/screen as a means of leaving processes running on a remote machine even if I’m disconnected. (If nohup is not sufficent.)

I’m getting the impression you use for development locally? Can you talk more about what you “split”? I don’t understand why you’d terminate the program to re-launch in tmux, rather than simply launching another terminal. (Or using C-z & bg.)

I also do something similar. I changed my keybinding to launch my terminal from “launch terminal” to “launch terminal with tmux.” That way, whenever I open a terminal, I’m automatically in tmux.

I don’t use named sessions too much. Mostly only when working remotely, in which case, I just attach to a session named remote. Otherwise, all of my sessions are just increasing integers. To make sure those sessions don’t pile up, I have a hook installed on session create/close that cleans things up and renumbers them.

I actually started this when I switched to alacritty because, at the time, it didn’t support scrollback. Alacritty supports that now, but I liked the tmux setup so much that I just stuck to it. Namely, I like that it permits keyboard driven vim-style visual selections. I also like that, since everything is in a tmux session, if I leave my workstation and later connect to it via SSH, I can jump into any of the sessions I may have left open. Really handy.

You do always have the option of making tmux your login shell – as tmux understands this. It’s what I’ve done for years and that way I’m never not in tmux. Until it crashes, but that’s very rare these days.

I’ve never worked out how to get tmux to play nicely with terminal scrollback so I end up avoiding running it when I don’t need it. I’ve started using dtach for the keep-running-when-ssh-goes-down features paired with some trickery to automatically connect the right terminal tabs to the right dtach sessions and that works quite nicely thank you very much.

This is what I use to decide whether to use tmux:

[ -z "$TMUX" ] && [ -z "$EMBEDDED" ] && { tmux attach || exec tmux new-session; }

The $EMBEDDED flag is set for non-interactive shells, such as the one puma-dev uses when it cds into my Ruby app directory. I configure this in the LaunchAgent like so:

   <dict>
     <key>EMBEDDED</key>
     <string>true</string>
   </dict>

Nice!

I have a similar setup, but mine boots straight into my home tmux session, and then I have a hot key bound to open a session switching script in a pane.

The session switcher makes a list of active sessions and combines that with all the folders from my projects directory, which is then piped into fzf.

This is nice because I switch projects a lot, and I enjoy not having to care about the distinction of whether a session is running or not.

I also have a little bash function called clone that takes a URL to a git repo, makes a new session with that name and then clones it into my project folder.

With that setup I’ve found it’s generally faster to clone and run ag to search a repo than to use Github search.

I am curious as to why not run tmux inside of vscode?

I am attempting a switch from tmux/emacs (session per project) to vscode (using one of the emacs bindings and project-mananger) but one of the things the project manager extension doesn’t do is maintain shell panels per project so I was thinking of running tmux (again session per project) and creating/auto attach to the session when the shell launches.