Tmux Proper Pipe Pane

Tmux enables easy command logging with pipe-pane, but it has some downsides.

This plugin improves the vanilla Tmux pipe-pane functionality.

About

This plugin brings the following improvements to the Tmux logging functionality:

1. removes ANSI codes from the log

This is how the plain pipe-pane log output looks like if you're using terminal with coloring:

Garbled characters are called ANSI codes. They enable colors in terminal, but are just making 'noise' in the textual log output.

tmux_ppp filters ANSI codes out of the log, which makes it nicely readable. Same log as above when using tmux_ppp:

2. single key binding toggles logging start/stop

This post on stackexchange describes how to setup key-bindings for logging with pipe-pane. There are 2 possiblities:

• you can setup a single key binding that toggles logging, but then you don't know if the toggle key started or stopped the logging. You just get the message logging is toggled.
• in order to properly setup messages for Starting and Ending logging, 2 key bindings have to be used. With so many Tmux key bindings, you might easily forget which key starts and which one ends logging and that' inconvenient.

tmux_ppp solves above inconveniences by enabling:

• a single key binding that toggles pipe-pane logging
• proper notifications, so it's clear whether the logging was started or stopped when key was pressed.

Installation with Tmux Plugin Manager (recommended)

Add plugin to the list of TPM plugins in .tmux.conf:

set -g @tpm_plugins "   \
  bruno-/tpm            \
  bruno-/tmux_ppp       \
"

Hit prefix + I to fetch the plugin and source it.

You should now have tmux_ppp binding defined.

Manual Installation

Clone the repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/bruno-/tmux_ppp ~/clone/path

Add this line to the bottom of .tmux.conf:

run-shell ~/clone/path/proper_pipe_pane.tmux

Reload TMUX environment:

# type this in terminal
$ tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

You should now have tmux_ppp binding defined.

Installing ansifilter (recommended for OSX users)

ansifilter is a program specialized for removing (or working with) ANSI codes.

If you're on OSX, it is recommened to install ansifilter: $ brew install ansifilter

If you're on Linux, tmux_ppp removes ANSI codes with sed regexes. This should work fine, but please open an issue if you find any problems.

Usage

This plugin defines prefix + P key binding (note, that's uppercase P).

Press prefix + P to start logging. Message is show with the path to log file:

Started logging to /Users/bruno/tmux-ppp-0-1-20140526T141437.log

To end logging, also press prefix + P. You'll get a notification:

Ended logging to /Users/bruno/tmux-ppp-0-1-20140526T141608.log

Credits

Thanks to Chris Johnsen for providing this answer on stackexchange. tmux_ppp is based on insights from that post.

License

MIT