dot_tmux

My tmux + bash configuration, with working copy-paste and a one-command install.

git clone https://github.com/sarsanaee/dot_tmux.git ~/dot_tmux
cd ~/dot_tmux && ./install.sh
exec bash          # pick up the new shell config

That is the whole reinstall procedure on a new machine. install.sh is idempotent — re-run it any time — and it backs up anything it replaces into ~/.dotfiles-backup/<timestamp>/.

Flag	Effect
--dry-run	Print every action, change nothing
--no-deps	Don't touch the package manager

./uninstall.sh removes the symlinks and the ~/.bashrc hook.

Layout

tmux/tmux.conf     -> ~/.tmux.conf      (symlink)
bash/inputrc       -> ~/.inputrc        (symlink)
bash/bashrc.local  sourced from ~/.bashrc via a marked block
install.sh         installer
uninstall.sh       reverses the installer

Nothing is copied, so editing a file in this repo takes effect immediately and git status shows what you changed. Your distro's ~/.bashrc is never rewritten — the installer only appends a guarded source line.

Host-specific or private settings go in ~/.bashrc.private, which bashrc.local sources if present and git never sees.

Why copy-paste was broken

The old config ended selections with:

bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel

copy-pipe pipes the selection into an external program — but no program was named, and tmux's copy-command option was never set. So every copy went into tmux's own paste buffer and stopped there. It was invisible to Ctrl+V in the browser, the editor, or anywhere else. Compounding it, no clipboard utility was installed on the machine at all, so there was nothing for tmux to pipe into even if it had tried.

The fix is copy-command, detected at config-load time so the same file works on Wayland, X11 and macOS:

if-shell 'command -v wl-copy >/dev/null 2>&1' \
    "set -s copy-command 'wl-copy --type text/plain'"

With that set, a bare copy-pipe-and-cancel routes through it and lands in the real system clipboard. set -g set-clipboard on additionally enables the OSC 52 escape-sequence route, which makes copy work over SSH in terminals that support it (kitty, alacritty, wezterm, foot, iTerm2). GNOME Terminal does not support OSC 52, which is why the external binary is the load-bearing part here.

Copy-paste cheat sheet

Prefix is Ctrl+Space.

Keyboard

Key	Action
prefix Enter	Enter copy mode
Alt+Up	Enter copy mode and start scrolling
v	Start selection
V	Select whole line
Ctrl+v	Toggle block (rectangle) selection
y or Enter	Copy to system clipboard and exit
Y	Copy the current line
/ ? n N	Search scrollback
q / Escape	Quit copy mode / clear selection
prefix p	Paste tmux buffer
prefix Ctrl+v	Paste the system clipboard
prefix Ctrl+p	Choose from paste history

Mouse

Action	Result
Drag	Copy to system clipboard, keeping scroll position
Double-click	Copy word
Triple-click	Copy line
Middle-click	Paste system clipboard
Wheel	Scroll into copy mode

Holding Shift while dragging bypasses tmux and uses GNOME Terminal's own selection — useful for grabbing text across split panes, which tmux cannot do.

From the shell

bashrc.local defines portable helpers:

ls -l | clip        # pipe command output to the clipboard
cpaste > out.txt    # write the clipboard to a file
cpwd                # copy the current directory path
cfile config.yaml   # copy a file's contents

Vim

Paired with dotvim. Four settings here exist for that pairing, and one of them does nothing on its own:

• focus-events on needs a second half. It only forwards focus to an application that has asked the terminal to report it. Vim on Ubuntu is built with +terminfo, and neither xterm-256color nor tmux-256color carries a focus-reporting capability — so Vim's t_fe comes up empty, it never sends the request, and FocusGained never fires no matter what is set here. dotvim's vimrc supplies t_fe/t_fd and the <FocusGained> key codes. Without that, this line is inert.
• mouse on vs Vim's mouse=a. Vim takes the mouse while it runs: drag selects in the buffer, dragging a split border resizes it. Hold Shift to fall through to the terminal's own selection, the same escape hatch that works for grabbing text across tmux panes.
• True colour. terminal-overrides ...:RGB plus COLORTERM surviving into the pane is what lets Vim switch on termguicolors. Inside tmux, Vim also has to be handed the RGB escapes by hand (t_8f/t_8b) — terminfo does not advertise them.
• escape-time 0 keeps Esc instant in Vim rather than waiting to see whether an escape sequence follows.

The smcup@:rmcup@ override applies to tmux and the terminal outside it, not to Vim inside tmux — Vim still restores your shell on :q. Checked, not assumed.

What else the bash config fixes

• Bracketed paste (~/.inputrc). Without it, pasting multiple lines executes each one on arrival, including a partial final line. This is the other half of "pasting into the terminal is awful".
• stty -ixon frees Ctrl+S, which otherwise sends XOFF and freezes the terminal until Ctrl+Q — a hang that looks exactly like a crash.
• Shared history across tmux panes, 100k entries, timestamped, deduplicated, flushed after every command so panes stop overwriting each other's history.
• Up/Down search history by prefix instead of walking every command.
• Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right word jumps, case-insensitive completion, no bell.

Names that used to collide

Two helpers were named after commands that already exist. Both were renamed; the old names now do what they always did.

Was	Now	Why
paste	cpaste	paste is coreutils — it merges lines from several files. A shell function of that name shadowed it and silently discarded its arguments, so paste a b returned the clipboard instead of the merged files. Wrong output, no error.
gs	gst	gs is Ghostscript. The alias turned gs file.pdf into git status -sb file.pdf.

The self-wrapping aliases (grep, rm, mv, cp, df, du, ip, diff, mkdir, free) shadow their own commands on purpose — that is the point of them. \grep or command grep bypasses one when you need the bare version.

tmux plugins

Managed by TPM, installed automatically.

• tmux-resurrect — prefix Ctrl+s save, prefix Ctrl+r restore.

Add one by putting a set -g @plugin '...' line above the final run line in tmux/tmux.conf, then prefix I.

Notes

• Requires tmux 3.2+ for copy-command. Check with tmux -V.
• default-terminal is tmux-256color. If you SSH from inside tmux to a host that lacks that terminfo entry, send it over once:

  infocmp -x tmux-256color | ssh THEHOST tic -x -

• The smcup@:rmcup@ override disables the alternate screen, so tmux output stays in the terminal's scrollback after you exit. Drop that line in tmux/tmux.conf if you would rather tmux restore the screen.