Setup Your Pure VIM Dev Environment--Part I

Why Tmux is needed?

During your daily work, it’s quite common to open several windows to accomplish your tasks.
If you don’t use Tmux alike screen manager, it will be totally a nightmare.

Following demonstrates a typical scene. You open a window to view the code project, and another one to build it. Apart from them, you can also open some other auxiliary windows, e.g, htop window, to watch the real-time CPU performance.

What’s more, if you are a DevOps engineer who should ssh to remote machine to do some developments, you will find Tmux useful. It offers you the mechanism to close the session temporarily without any concern, and reattach to it in an easy manner. Tmux will manage the sessions until your next access.

There are definitely other alternatives to Tmux, e.g, screen, and you can choose anyone as you like. In this post, we mainly describe our settings based on Tmux.

Setup

Install Tmux:

sudo apt-get install tmux

Download the config repo to your home directory:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:sunbingfeng/tmux-config.git $HOME/.tmux

Set it as the default tmux configuration:

ln -s ~/.tmux/.tmux.conf ~/.tmux.conf

Usage

The default prefix/leader key is Control+o, and you can change it to your preference.

Basic:

• tmux to create a new tmux session
• tmux a to attach to an existed session
• The prefix key must be typed before any commands
• Control+o then ? to bring up list of key mappings

Window managements:

• Control+o then s to show list of windows available
• Control+o then f to search window through keywords
• Control+o then , to rename current window
• Control+o then & to kill current window
• Control+o then c to create new window
• Control+o then n to goto the next window
• Control+o then p to goto the previous window
• Control+o then Control+a switch between current and last window
• Control+o then [0-9] to goto the numbered window

Pane managements:

• Control+o then v to split horizontally
• Control+o then b to split vertically
• Control+o then ; to switch between current and last pane
• Control+o then h,j,k,l to move left, down, up, right respectively as vim does
• Control+o then z to maximum/restore current pane
• Control+o then x to close current pane

Copy&Paste:
We use xclip be default, so you should install it through: sudo apt-get install xclip

• Control+o then [ to enter copy mode
• Press v to select blocks, or V to select multiple lines, and then y to copy it to clipboard
• Goto where you want to paste, and press i to enter edit mode. Press Control+o then ] to paste.