Step 5: Customizing the Windows Hopefully you already know the difference between sessions, windows, and panes.

If not first look up setting up.tmux.conf or something similar.

Step 1: How to Change the Status Line set -g status-left set -g status-right Replace with a string of all the options you want.

Background color can be set using bgcolour where is some number 0255 for terminals with 256 color support.

To change the foreground color (text color) its just fgcolour (Again replacing with a number between 0 and 255).

To view all 255 colors at once see the comment of this stack overflow answer One of the first things I wanted to do was to add the date and time in the status line.

Here is a complete list of options or for a shorter more readable list see part of my.tmux.conf Adding H:M in the string will show the current time in a 24 hour format without seconds (something like 15:38).

Step 2: Tmux Specific Values Tmux has its own set of values that stand for different things.

For example H refers to the hostname of the computer you are currently on and S to the index of the current session.

Tmux Custom Status Bar How To Show Or

For the complete list of options go here and search for this phrase Character pair Replaced with UPDATE 42018 So I recently learned how to show or hide text in the status line given the current state (if the prefix has been pressed or if a window is zoomed etc).

The official man page of tmux has a list of attributes which keep track of the state of the panewindowsession.

Visit the page and search for The following variables are available, where appropriate and you will see a long list of options.

How can these be used you ask, well for knowing if the prefix has been pressed or not I change the color of part of my status line with the following code.

Here Im inserting text to change the background color but any text can be inserted including ICONS.

For displaying an icon if the current window is zoomed in (which can be done with prefix z) see the code below.

I add an extra space here both before and after to keep it from looking cramped).

END UPDATE Step 3: Using Bash Commands to Display Cool Stuff The last key step is being able to display cool information using bash commands.

This can include things like battery percentage, current song playing etc.

Tmux Custom Status Bar Mac Specific Terminal

For example, I display the current battery percentage using the following command: pmset -g batt grep 0-90-9 awk NR1print3 cut -c 13 Note: This only works for Macs since pmset is a mac specific terminal command.

I have a file stored on my computer called battery.sh.

The file is two lines long.

Line 1 is the bash shebang ( binbash ) and line 2 is the command above.

Check out for getting the current playing Spotify song, this again is mac only because the developer wrote this script in apple script.

But the point is you can find scripts that other people already wrote for your environment and easily add them to your status line.