DEV Community

Play Button Pause Button
Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at waylonwalker.com

clean up tmux status-bar

The tmux status bar can be a handy tool to remind yourself where you are within tmux. It can also include a bunch of system information like battery status, cpu, mem, whatever you can get from the command line. Honestly I like to keep
it minimal, and actually keep it turned off most of the time. I find that it helps a little bit for others to follow along if I keep it on in certain circumstances.

show the status bar

You can set a hotkey to show or hide the status bar.

bind s set-option -g status
bind C-s set-option -g status
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

setting the background transparent

I really want a minimal status bar with very little bling, I want it to get out of the way an not draw too much attention, so step one is to set the background to transparent.

# default statusbar colors
#――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
set-option -g status-bg default
set-option -g status-fg colour240
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

setting default colors

I want my status bar to somewhat match the rest of my theme, so I set the default foreground as magenta and the default background as transparent.

# default window title colors
#―――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
set-window-option -g window-status-style fg=magenta
set-window-option -g window-status-style bg=default
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

my status bar

Honestly I set this up quite awhile ago, and it does everything I need it to for now. It shows me the current session that I am in on the left and lists out the windows for the session in the middle.

set -g status-left-length 85
set -g status-left "working on#[fg=colour135] #S"
set -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│#[fg=white bg=cyan]#W#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│"
set -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│#[fg=colour135 bg=black]#W#[fg=black,bold bg=default]│"
set -g status-style bg=default
set -g status-right "#[fg=magenta] #[bg=gray] %b %d %Y %l:%M %p"
set -g status-right '#(gitmux "#{pane_current_path}")' 
set -g status-justify centre
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

For more format options search for FORMATS in the tmux manpage.

Be sure to check out the full YouTube playlist and subscribe if you like it.

tmux playlist on youtub

Top comments (0)