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tmuxs

Contribution: Session save and restore, TUI performance and navigation, colour fix

Status: Session save and restore merged; TUI work in an open pull request

A terminal project launcher that makes it easier to find projects and create or reopen their tmux sessions. My contributions include saving and restoring sessions across reboots, faster terminal-interface rendering, hierarchical navigation, and a fix for colour loss inside tmux.

Case study

tmuxs is a terminal project launcher: it finds your projects and creates or reopens their tmux sessions, with workspace-scoped sessions, recent and favourite projects, layout recipes, themes and diagnostics. I contributed to tmuxs; I did not create it.

The problem

Managing tmux sessions by hand across many project folders is repetitive. My work targeted three gaps: sessions lost on reboot, a slow terminal interface, and Claude Code and Codex showing no colour inside tmux even though colour worked outside it.

What was built

  • Session save and restore: workspace-scoped snapshots that bring back windows, panes, their directories, and the active window and pane after a reboot, across the macOS, Linux and Windows scripts.
  • Faster terminal-interface rendering, by removing subshell forks from the render loops.
  • Hierarchical navigation with a focused tab bar, plus fixes to focus in the project and session pickers.
  • A fix for colour loss inside tmux, traced to NO_COLOR and TERM values inherited from the tmux server.

Key decisions

  • Diagnose the inherited server environment before treating colour loss as a theme bug.
  • Do not advertise truecolor on terminals that cannot display it.
  • Keep machine-specific paths out of tracked configuration by ignoring per-machine config files.
  • Make matching changes in all three platform directories.

Outcomes

  • Session save and restore merged on 30 June 2026.
  • The rendering, navigation and colour work is in an open pull request, awaiting review.

Where it stands

Session save and restore is part of tmuxs. The rendering, navigation and colour work has not been merged yet. Restoring brings back layouts and directories, not running commands, editor buffers or scrollback.

How it was built

Tooling

  • Bash — The launcher and session scripts
  • tmux — Sessions saved and restored across reboots
  • macOS, Linux and Windows (WSL) — Matching changes in all three platform directories