tmux Cross Platform Config.

Oct 20, 2015

If like me you use tmux on both Linux and OS X, then managing your tmux configuration can be a pain. The problem is there is configuration that is specific to either OS, such as copy and paste behavior. This blog post will show you how to manage your tmux configuration across platforms in a better way.

The first thing you want to do is create a dot file for each platform, so for Linux create .tmux-linux.conf and for OS X create .tmux-osx.conf. Create and place these files in the same location as your .tmux.conf file (most likely your home directory).

Now move any OS specific settings out of .tmux.conf into .tmux-osx.conf and .tmux-linux.conf respectively.

In your .tmux.conf file add the line:

if-shell "uname | grep -q Darwin" 'source-file ~/.tmux-osx.conf' \
'source-file ~/.tmux-linux.conf'

Basically, when tmux reads in it’s configuration, if the OS is ‘Darwin’ (OS X) then it will read .tmux-osx.conf else it will read in .tmux-linux.conf.

Note: the above code snippet assumes that the three *.conf files are placed in your home directory, if they are not change the paths.