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tmuxguard

tmux status bar highlights the session name in red if a window fails

I'm using tmux 2.0, installed on OSX with Homebrew. My terminal uses the solarized colour scheme.

If I move my tmux.conf (to ensure I'm using default settings) then my status line looks like this:

default status line

If I then run a process which fails, the session name gets highlighted in red:

errored status line

No matter what I do, this stays highlighted in red. I've tried all the settings I can find to try and change this behaviour but I haven't found any that change it at all.

The failing process is the ruby command line tool guard. I'm making it fail because it depends on zeus and I don't have zeus running. In this scenario, guard shows an error in the terminal but doesn't exit. This is the scenario that this red highlighting happens in.

If I make it fail fatally and exit (e.g. if there is no Guardfile) then the highlighting doesn't happen.

I assume that tmux is recognising that some kind of error has happened (because the process is returning an error response code?) and is using the highlighting to alert me to that.

Some of the settings I've tried to modify include:

  • window-status-activity-attr
  • window-status-activity-bg
  • display-panes-active-colour
  • bell-action
  • bell-on-alert
Solution

  • Turns out this is actually a feature of Guard: https://github.com/guard/guard/wiki/System-notifications#tmux