Scripting tmux | Hacker News Reader

Scripting tmux

arp242.net

187 pointsmplanchard19 comments

This comment was posted using tmux scripting, as follows:

    set -x
    send(){ tmux send "$@";}       
    send 'links -no-connect https://news.ycombinator.com/login?goto=news' ;
    send c-m; sleep 2;
    send 3xblah c-m $HNPASSWORD c-m c-m c-m; sleep 2;
    send Escape; sleep 1; send V S; sleep 1;
    send 'scripting tmux' c-m Down Down Down Down Down Down c-m;
    send Escape; sleep 1; send V S; sleep 1;
    send 'add comment' c-m Up;
    send 'This comment was posted using tmux scripting, as follows: ' c-m; 
    a=$(sed '5,18!d' $0); sleep 2;
    send "$a"; sleep 2; send c-m c-m Down c-m;

A tmux/HN quine, or at least something close to it. This deserves to go into some sort of hall of fame.

Nice, I had no idea you could script tmux like that! Reminds me of "expect", which I've used to automate interactive SSH sessions with network devices.

Replacing the sleeps with calls to "tmux capture-pane" to parse the responses would be closer to expect.

Brainless method I use to check the panel:

  case $1 in
  ""|-b|-E|-S|-t)
  tmux capturep $@ --;
  tmux showb $@ --;
  exec tmux dele --;
  esac

Also there is a "-N repeat count" option for send-keys in newer versions of tmux.

capture-pane has -p so you can pipe its output rather than letting it create a buffer you have to delete.

s/has/now &/

I started using tmux in 2009. There was no -p option when capturep command was first added. Old scripts that keep working tend not to get updated. I have updated it now. Thank you.

Is this an accidental quine? That's so cool.

[Quine]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29

I wrote libtmux (https://libtmux.git-pull.com) as a way to control tmux via python objects.

In the backend, it's all tmux CLI commands.

tmuxp (https://tmuxp.git-pull.com), similar to tmuxinator, uses libtmux under the hood to build workspaces from a yaml/json file: https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp/blob/master/tmuxp/works...

Despite that, I've found some people prefer just using plain tmux scripting (https://twitter.com/bitprophet/status/561356905843392514). Aside: That's Jeff Forcier, creator of fabric (http://www.fabfile.org/)

Through tmux's formats (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#FORMATS), you can about any info you'd like on your workspace.

An area I don't know about is -C (control mode). libtmux could technically use it to get live updates rather than inefficiently and possibly needlessly querying session/window/pane info to keep objects up to date. Apparently iterm2's tmux integration uses it.

This is awesome. I had to hack together some scripts to implement workspace building and tmuxp looks like it might have saved me a lot of headache!

I use Tmux for starting 4 Bhyve VM's on FreeBSD via rc.local. It really like it better than screen or daemon processes. Nice for large compiling jobs on remote machines too.

Just this night I was thinking if whether tmux scripting could be abused to get it to work like zmodem. Sending files from the system with the tmux session to whatever machine one had sshd into (and ideally the other direction as well).

Anyone know of this or a better approach?

Tmux has pipe-pane, and it has -I and -O to go both directions.

It does require some gyrations to get around the fact that it logs everything (the command itself, terminal control, etc), and not just what's output by the command. Here's a quick and dirty example:

a) Start a tmux session to a remote host

b) On the local host, run this (assuming session 0):

$ tmux pipe-pane -o -t0 "tail -n +2 | col -b | base64 -d > ~/output"

$ tmux send-keys -t0 "base64 /some/file && read" Enter

$ tmux pipe-pane -t0

$ tmux send-keys -t0 Enter

You should now have ~/output on the local host, which is identical to /some/file on the remote.

Thank you, that is great! Will certainly play around with that :)

Have been looking for a while, but does anyone know if there is there anything like which-key for tmux?

which-key on vim has been great in making sure, I use new features, I add to my config file.

Prefix + ? will show you the current key map; it is searchable like normal text.

Not utterly comfortable, but helps most of the time.

That's nice to know, thanks.

Despite using tmux for years, even having written scripts for nested sessions that I use each day, I hadn't noticed the CLI was missing long options. Kind of crazy.

This is a common property of software with BSD-ish roots. For example, neither does OpenSSH's ssh.

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