tmux: hangs and do not load, and do not respond to any option command

Had a similar issue, where I had a tmux session with two buffers. I didn't see anything I typed, but when I switched between buffers what I had typed previously would appear onscreen. stty sane didn't work.

I detached Ctrl-b+d, and noticed that there was still a client attached when I looked at tmux list-clients. tmux detach-client removed it, and then I could reattach and the everything worked again.

If it is ok to lose your sessions, try deleting the tmux-NNNNNNN directory, where NNNNNNN is a number, under your /tmp directory. According to the tmux manual, if the TMPDIR environment variable is set, the tmux-NNNNNNN will be put in the TMPDIR.

tmux stores the server socket in a directory under /tmp (or TMPDIR if set);

This solved my problem of not being able to run tmux commands that are related to sessions. I also tried the following, but they did not work:

• killall -9 tmux
• reinstall tmux
• restart shell session

I could not easily restart the operating system, because it's a shared server managed by others.

I had faced this problem for a long time and after a bit of searching I figured out that this was being caused because I accidently hit Ctrl+S (Ctrl+A+S is my shortcut for switching panes), and this turns off flow control in terminals and stops the terminal from accepting input. It can be reenabled by pressing Ctrl+Q.

Source: https://superuser.com/a/553349/137226

tmux was halting right after I started it. Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-C didn't do anything.

Fixed with

killall -9 tmux

(May be a different problem, but this question showed up in Google.)