Save and restore a tmux session

As the number of running commands has increased from one to four, I’ve needed a better way to manage all the running terminals. I’ve always wanted to give tmux a try, and this was the perfect opportunity. But it takes a little time to run all the commands across different Git repositories so that my entire environment is ready for local development. What I needed was a way to save my session, and that’s exactly what the tmux-resurrect plugin does.

Installation

To install a plugin (without the package manager, which I could not get working), clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect

Then add the following line to your ~/.tmux.config file:

run-shell ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect/resurrect.tmux

Finally, reload tmux with:

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.config

Usage

Once I have a session configured the way I want, I need only type Ctrl-B Ctrl-s to save it. Then, the next time I need to restore that session, I simply enter Ctrl-B Ctrl-r.