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Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

Posted on • Originally published at waylonwalker.com

send notifications to tmux sessions

You've got some long running tasks, and you're trying to stay productive and
knock tasks off that board, but you keep finding that your processes finish and
you stay on other tasks for longer than you should. You were in the flow and
just did not check back in on it. With display-message you can send yourself
a notification when that long running task is complete.

from the man page

Here is a snippet of display-message from the tmux man page. I rarely need
to do anything other than just display message, but there are other flags for
it.

display-message [-aINpv] [-c target-client] [-d delay] [-t target-pane] [message]
            (alias: display)

        Display a message.  If -p is given, the output is printed to stdout,
        otherwise it is displayed in the target-client status line for up to

        delay milliseconds.  If delay is not given, the message-time option is
        used; a delay of zero waits for a key press.  ā€˜Nā€™ ignores key presses
        and closes only after the delay expires.  The format of message is
        described in the FORMATS section;

        information is taken from target-pane if -t is given, otherwise the
        active pane.

        -v prints verbose logging as the format is parsed and -a lists the
        format variables and their values.

        -I forwards any input read from stdin to the empty pane given by
        target-pane.
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notifier

With display-message we can do things like setup notifications that will work
cross platform.

cmatrix -t 5 && tmux display-message done
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Without setting the target-pane display-message defaults to the active pane.
This is a very handy feature that allows us to switch windows, or sessions and
still recieve the message.

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

tmux playlist on youtub

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