I am a terminal kind of person. Managing servers and using vim as my text editor of choice, I spend a lot of time in the terminal - a text-based interface allowing to run programs, explore and manipulate the file system, and configure and control the operating system.

I started out using GNU Screen as my terminal multiplexer, software that allows me to run multiple terminals on a single window or session, and keep those terminals open when I disconnected or closed the window.

There are a few issues with screen, such as mouse interactions not working over a certain number of characters in vim, that I have lived with until I found Byobu, an enhancement for screen and tmux that added some sweet features like a status bar.

However, there were some really annoying bugs in the versions that I was jumping between, like listing and attaching to existing sessions.

I eventually switched over to byobu with tmux as it fixed some of the issues with screen and ended up scrapping byobu as tmux is incredibly powerful by itself. The only thing that was missing/not simple to was the half-of-the-time-broken list and reattach to a session feature. So, I decided to write my own script to do it.

#!/bin/bash
 
readarray -t sessions < <(tmux list-sessions)
 
if [ $# -ge 1 ]; then
  if [ "$1" == "." ]; then
    name=$(basename $(pwd))
  else
    name=$1
  fi
  if tmux list-sessions 2>&1 | grep "^$name:" >> /dev/null; then
    tmux attach-session -t $name
  else
    tmux new-session \; rename-session $name
  fi
else
  for i in "${!sessions[@]}"; do
    echo $((i+1)): ${sessions[$i]}
  done
 
  read -p 'Enter a session number or enter the name for a new session: ' index
 
  re='^[0-9]+$'
  if ! [[ "$index" =~ $re ]]; then
    tmux new-session \; rename-session $index
  elif [ "$((index - 1))" -ge 0 ] && [ "$((index - 1))" -lt ${#sessions[@]} ]; then
    id=`echo ${sessions[$((index-1))]} | cut -d ':' -f 1`
 
    tmux attach-session -t $id
  fi
fi

I called the script tm and put it in my PATH and presto, a working list and reattach sessions command.

$ tm
1: 3: 4 windows (created Fri Jul 24 22:08:47 2020)
2: 4: 2 windows (created Fri Aug 7 20:35:47 2020)
3: blog: 5 windows (created Wed Jul 22 08:56:38 2020) (attached)
n: Create a new session
Enter a session number or enter the name for a new session: