Launching tmux using gnome-terminal

Here is how one can set tmux to launch with gnome-terminal:

1. Launch gnome-terminal
2. Menu > Edit > Profile Preferences > Title and Command (Tab)
3. Check Run a custom command instead of my shell
4. Populate Custom command with tmux

These instruction work for me on Ubuntu 11.04. The equivalent should work for gnome-terminal for any flavor of Linux.

Launching anything from .zshenv is definitely the wrong approach. This file is executed by every instance of zsh, even when running a script. Use .zshrc for things that should be done in interactive shells, and .profile (or .zprofile, if you've set zsh as your login shell) for things that should be done when you log in.

If you want tmux in every terminal, start tmux directly under the terminal, e.g., gnome-terminal -e tmux (change your GUI launcher to pass these arguments). You can pass arguments even with -e (though be careful with quoting), e.g. gnome-termminal -e 'tmux -s ~/.alternate.tmux.conf'.

If you also want to start tmux when you log in over ssh, you'll have to launch it from your ~/.profile. Do this only if the parent process of the login shell is sshd:

parent_process_name=$(ps -o comm= -p $PPID`)
case ${parent_process_name##*/} in
  sshd) type tmux >/dev/null 2>/dev/null && exec tmux;;
esac

Another approach to starting tmux over ssh would be to obtain a session name from the environment. That way you could attach to an existing session. The easiest way is to write a small script on the server side, e.g. ~/bin/tmux-login-session:

#!/bin/sh
if tmux has-session -t "$1"; then
  exec tmux attach-session -t "$1"
else
  . ~/.profile
  exec tmux new-session -s "$1"
fi

Then use an ssh command like the following:

ssh -t hostname.example.com bin/tmux-login-session SESSION_NAME

Execute the following commands at the terminal to get tmux to run everytime you launch gnome-terminal:

gconftool --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/custom_command "tmux"
gconftool --type bool --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/use_custom_command "true"

These set of commands make gnome-terminal to launch tmux at terminal start.

• This will result in gnome-terminal quiting when you quit tmux.
• It will not interfere with ssh or login in anyway as it is a gnome-terminal setting.
• Also, you can use all the shortcuts of gnome-terminal you have pinned on the desktop and launch it from the command line with tmux running, so you wont need to create a custom shortcut for this behaviour.