We're a small, remote engineering team (only 3 people), so we haven't developed a standard for our development machines yet. We have 1 person on Mac, 1 person on Ubuntu (me), and 1 person on Manjaro (Linux).

We're always experimenting with new tools and adding new ones to our toolbox. The one I want to talk about today is tmuxinator.

If you're familiar with tmux, it can be a bit of a pain to script your tmux sessions. For example, if you want one pane to run vim, another to show a log file, and a third to run the rails console, it takes a bit of time to script.

The goal is this: When I turn on my machine in the morning, I want to type one command to do the following:

Start vim in the right directory.
Give myself a command prompt in the right project directory.
Start the Rails server.
Start a tail of the development log.
Start the Rails console.
Start spork for running specs.

You can easily script all of this with tmuxinator.

Using the script above, you end up with a tmux layout like so.

When I start my terminal for the day, I run the command mux tula and I'm off and running. A tmux session is started and I end up with the following:

vim running in the top window
a prompt on the bottom for playing with git, bundle, etc.
the Rails server running on window 1
the development log tail on window 2
a Rails console on window 3

You're up and running for development in no time.

As a bonus if you work on multiple projects, simply detach from this tmux session and run another. Your session is saved (until you restart your computer), so switching between projects is a breeze.

I haven't played much with this layout and I'm sure it's not perfect. It's a much better solution to what I was doing in a previous life. If you have any of your own tmux layouts, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.

And, by the way, if you need a great tmux primer, I recommend TMUX – The Terminal Multiplexer.