Status Bar and Plugin Manager (TPM)

The status bar is your dashboard

The bottom line of tmux is a customizable status bar that shows session name, window list, time, system info — anything you can compute. Default is functional; with a few lines of config it becomes informative and pretty.

Status-bar primitives

status-position — top or bottom.
status-style — colors for the bar background and default foreground.
status-left / status-right — strings rendered on the left and right ends.
window-status-format / window-status-current-format — how each window tab looks.
pane-border-style / pane-active-border-style — colors for borders between panes.

Inside any of these strings you can interpolate variables with #{var} and run shell commands with #(cmd). Common ones: #S (session name), #I (window index), #W (window name), #H (host), #(date +%H:%M) (clock).

TPM — Tmux Plugin Manager

TPM is the de-facto plugin manager for tmux. Install it once, declare plugins in ~/.tmux.conf, install with prefix + I, update with prefix + U. The plugin ecosystem is small but every plugin in it solves a real problem.

The four plugins worth installing immediately

tmux-plugins/tpm — the manager itself. Required.
tmux-plugins/tmux-sensible — sets a few defaults everyone agrees on (history-limit, escape-time, focus-events). It's redundant with what we already configured, but harmless and a convention many configs assume.
tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect — saves and restores tmux sessions across reboots. Press prefix + Ctrl-s to save, prefix + Ctrl-r to restore. The restored session has the same windows, panes, working directories, and (optionally) the running programs.
tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum — auto-saves every 15 minutes (uses tmux-resurrect under the hood). With continuum-restore on, tmux restores your last session automatically when started.

Resurrect + Continuum = persistence beyond reboots. Without these, a reboot loses your tmux state. With them, your workspace survives reboots, OS upgrades, even moving to a new machine (if you carry your home directory). The combination is what people mean when they say tmux is "forever."

Clipboard integration

By default a copy in tmux only goes to tmux's internal buffer. To make it land in the system clipboard so other apps can paste it, bind the copy-mode y key to pipe through pbcopy (macOS), xclip (Linux X11), or wl-copy (Wayland). The tmux-yank plugin automates this across platforms.

Code

Status-bar styling — a clean dark scheme·tmux

# Position
set -g status-position bottom

# Colors (GitHub Dark-ish)
set -g status-style "bg=#161b22,fg=#8b949e"
set -g status-left "#[fg=#019833,bold] #S "
set -g status-right "#[fg=#8b949e] %Y-%m-%d %H:%M "
set -g status-left-length 40
set -g status-right-length 40

# Window tabs
setw -g window-status-format " #I:#W "
setw -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=#e6edf3,bg=#30363d,bold] #I:#W "

# Pane borders
set -g pane-border-style "fg=#30363d"
set -g pane-active-border-style "fg=#019833"

# Activity highlight
setw -g monitor-activity on
set -g visual-activity off

Install TPM·bash

git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tpm ~/.tmux/plugins/tpm

Plugin block — paste at the bottom of ~/.tmux.conf·tmux

# ───────────── Plugins ─────────────
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tpm'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-sensible'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-yank'

# Resurrect tweaks
set -g @resurrect-capture-pane-contents 'on'
set -g @resurrect-strategy-vim 'session'
set -g @resurrect-strategy-nvim 'session'

# Continuum tweaks
set -g @continuum-restore 'on'
set -g @continuum-save-interval '15'

# THIS LINE MUST BE LAST
run '~/.tmux/plugins/tpm/tpm'

TPM key bindings·text

prefix + I        install plugins listed in .tmux.conf
prefix + U        update installed plugins
prefix + alt + u  uninstall plugins not in .tmux.conf

Per-platform clipboard yank (skip if you use tmux-yank)·tmux

# macOS
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "pbcopy"

# Linux X11
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "xclip -sel clip -i"

# Linux Wayland
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "wl-copy"

Exercise

Install TPM (the git clone above). Add the plugin block to ~/.tmux.conf. Reload with prefix + r. Press prefix + I to install. Verify: (1) prefix + Ctrl-s shows a save message, (2) reboot your machine (or tmux kill-server), start tmux again — continuum-restore should bring back your previous session, (3) yank text in copy mode and paste in another app to confirm clipboard integration works.

Status Bar and Plugin Manager (TPM)

The status bar is your dashboard

Status-bar primitives

TPM — Tmux Plugin Manager

The four plugins worth installing immediately

Clipboard integration

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

Comments 0