tmux Tutorial
tmux Tutorial
Section titled “tmux Tutorial”A staged, hands-on guide that takes you from zero to confident with tmux — the terminal multiplexer that turns a single SSH connection into a persistent, multi-pane workspace.
🎯 Who this is for
Section titled “🎯 Who this is for”- Primary audience: the iSu Technologies engineering team, working from macOS locally with SSH into our Hetzner server (production-server-01).
- Secondary audience: anyone using an iPad with Termius for occasional remote work.
- Skill level: assumes you’re comfortable with a terminal, but no prior tmux experience required.
The tutorial is built in four stages. Each stage is small enough to absorb in one sitting and ends with a practical drill. Don’t skip ahead — Stage 2 only makes sense once Stage 1 is muscle memory.
📚 The four stages
Section titled “📚 The four stages”| Stage | Page | What you’ll learn |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 | Survival Kit | Install tmux, the 10 commands you can’t live without, your first persistence drill |
| Stage 2 | Daily Driver | Windows, pane splits, naming, resizing, and copy mode |
| Stage 3 | Customisation | A production-ready ~/.tmux.conf, Mac terminal setup, multi-session workflow |
| Stage 4 | Automation | Idempotent project startup scripts, a project picker menu, optional plugins |
Plus two reference pages:
- Cheat Sheet — every keybinding and command on one page, organised by category
- Troubleshooting — symptom → cause → fix for the common gotchas
Start with the Introduction for the mental model, then work through the stages in order.
🚀 Already using tmux for Claude Code?
Section titled “🚀 Already using tmux for Claude Code?”If you only need a quick “keep Claude alive across SSH disconnects” recipe, the Claude Persistent Sessions guide is more focused for that single use case. Come back here when you want the full tutorial.
🛠️ A note on examples
Section titled “🛠️ A note on examples”The source material references real iSu projects — NAFBI, ThriveSend, ParallelSelf, RAS Kruger — as session and window names. Those are kept as-is throughout the tutorial because concrete examples land better than foo and bar. Substitute your own project names as you go.
All keystroke examples assume the iSu dev server’s prefix key (Ctrl+a). Vanilla tmux out of the box uses Ctrl+b; if you’re following along on a setup that hasn’t been remapped, substitute Ctrl+b wherever you see Ctrl+a X. The Introduction page explains how to check what your prefix is.