tmux plugins: TPM, and the five worth installing

TPM (Tmux Plugin Manager) is how you install tmux plugins: clone it once, list plugins as set -g @plugin lines in ~/.tmux.conf, then press prefix and a capital I to fetch them. Most tmux setups only need three or four plugins — session persistence and pane/vim navigation cover almost everything people actually reach for. None of this changes the actual tmux commands covered in tmux commands; plugins add bindings on top, they don't replace what's already there.

Installing TPM#

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

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tpm'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-sensible'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'
 
run '~/.tmux/plugins/tpm/tpm'

The plugins worth installing#

Session persistence: resurrect and continuum#

These are two separate plugins that are almost always installed together, and it's worth being precise about which one does what. tmux-resurrect is the save/restore mechanism — prefix Ctrl-s writes the current state to disk, prefix Ctrl-r reads it back. On its own it's a manual snapshot, not automatic.

tmux-continuum sits on top of it: it calls resurrect's save on a timer, and can call its restore automatically the moment tmux starts.

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'
set -g @continuum-restore 'on'
set -g @continuum-save-interval '15'

One caveat worth knowing before you rely on this: continuum restores state once a tmux server exists, it doesn't itself get tmux running again after a reboot. If your goal is "reboot the box and the session is just there," you still need something outside tmux — a systemd unit or a cron @reboot line — to start tmux in the first place. Continuum's own docs cover that wiring; don't assume it happens for free.

Staying oriented: vim-tmux-navigator and tmux-yank#

vim-tmux-navigator is the one people install after they've spent a week hitting prefix then an arrow key to move out of vim and into the next pane, and getting tired of it. The full config — both the tmux side and the vim/Neovim side — is in tmux and vim, since it needs changes in both places to work.

tmux-yank is smaller in scope but removes a real annoyance: without it, a copy-mode selection only lands in tmux's own paste buffer, and getting it to the system clipboard means piping through pbcopy or xclip by hand in your config. tmux-yank does that detection for you.

One status-bar theme, if you want one#

Plenty of tmux status-bar plugins exist, and most of them are cosmetic — the actual value is in the plugins above, not in the status line. If you want a themed status bar, catppuccin/tmux is a current, actively maintained option worth looking at rather than something abandoned since 2019. Treat this one as taste, not signal.

Most people need three plugins, not thirty#

Dotfiles repos with forty-line plugin lists are usually the result of years of "I'll try this" commits that never got removed, not a considered setup. A reasonable core is TPM itself plus tmux-sensible, tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum, and vim-tmux-navigator if you use vim or Neovim. Add tmux-yank if you copy out of tmux often. Add a status theme if you care what it looks like. Stop there — every additional plugin is something you now have to remember exists when something behaves oddly.

Plugins are why tmux feels slow to start#

If tmux takes a visible moment to draw its first prompt, plugins are almost always the cause, not tmux itself. TPM's run line, and any run-shell hook a plugin registers, execute every time the first client attaches — each one is a process fork, and they add up linearly with plugin count. Status-bar segments that shell out on every refresh (battery, CPU, weather-style plugins) cause a second, separate kind of lag: redraw stutter rather than startup delay, but it reads the same to the person hitting it.

To find the culprit, comment plugins out of ~/.tmux.conf one at a time and reload, or start a throwaway session with a stripped config (tmux -f /dev/null) to confirm a plugin-free tmux is instant — if it is, the slowdown is in the list, not in tmux.

Once tmux-continuum is actually keeping a session alive across reboots, the next question is usually whether it worked — and checking that from somewhere that isn't the machine itself is the same problem tmux ssh covers for connections in general. If you'd rather glance at a session from a browser than reattach over SSH to confirm, that's what mtmux (npm i -g mtmux) does.