How to copy or restore tmux settings

Written by Kaan Akşit, 7 March 2025

Disclamer: This article is only tested under Ubuntu 24.10.

tmux is a powerful terminal tool for keeping tabs in your terminal alive. Their source code and documentation is readily available in their codebase. This document can help a person willing to restore or copy for various reasons (e.g., broken installation, cloning settings to a new computer or alike).

Harvesting settings

In order to harvest settings from a computer that has tmux installed, please first start a tmux session by simply typing in your terminal:

tmux

As the new session start, you can copy the existing settings from that session to a file located in ~/.tmux.conf using the following syntax:

tmux show -g | sed 's/^/set -g /' > ~/.tmux.conf

Once complete, you can type exit in the same session you created to exit the session and copy ~/.tmux.conf any location or computer you desire.

Feeding settings to a computer

Assuming that you have copied the settings harvested from another computer to another and the settings file is now located at ~/.tmux.conf on that new computer, first start a new session using tmux syntax in your terminal. Now you can simply pass the following syntax to load the settings file:

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

This will load the configuration file for your tmux.