Automatically kill the newly created window after restoring session

[PhilippMeissner]

Hi there,

First of all, thanks for the great work - tmux-resurrect has been a huge help and time-saver to me!
I noticed something odd, which I am unsure if it's supposed to be like that or if I am missing some kind of configuration to fix it.

In order to restore my windows/panes, I start the terminal, enter a new tmux session with tmux and run tmux-resurrect with ctrl+b ctrl+r. It restores everything just fine, but in the end there will always be that originally created tmux-window with name: 0 that I created in order to be able to restore the other windows in the first place.
Is there a way to have that auto-killed after restoring my windows/panes?

[jiaming10]

Would you able to describe how you save the session? Because for me it work just fine (tmux 2.6, tmux-resurrection at this commit e3f05dd).

I do have a similar problem but it is a different workflow than yours. For me, I'm trying to autostart tmux in zsh, then restore my sessions. This always have a lingering session from the autostart, so I will have to kill it.

[PhilippMeissner]

I just press the "save" hotkey when I am inside a tmux session.

[jiaming10]

Just want to be sure, when you save the session, are you certain there is no other sessions running?

[PhilippMeissner]

Just want to be sure, when you save the session, are you certain there is no other sessions running?

Yes, I do have a fixed set of 5 windows, each with a specific name, that I am running simultaneously. tmux ls indicates specifically these named windows. After I restore the session, I will have a new window (The one I created to restore the session) which (by default) has the 0 name.

A workaround I can think of would be to restore the session by running tmux restore in the terminal (for example). Is there a way to do so?

[jiaming10]

I think I have the rough idea now. But to confirm could you screenshot after running tmux ls?

And, could you also screenshot after listing windows in tmux? (default key Ctrl + B, W)

[PhilippMeissner]

This is my current state:

Now I save that state with the hotkey, run tmux kill-server and tmux is closed.
To restore the windows/panes I am now opening a new session by tmux, inside I run the restore command via hotkey again and am left with:

As you can see, the first window 0 is the one I originally created to restore the session.
I manually kill that window, as I have no use for it.
On the one hand I think it could be neat to have that unused window automatically closed upon restoring, then again, if somebody were to create new windows and work with them, then at some point wants to restore the previously saved state, it's currently adding the previously stored state to its current state. That is definitely less destructive, but is it intentional?

[jiaming10]

OK, I think I know what is happening.

What you have created, is not windows, but are sessions.
So you have 3 sessions, with 1 window:
ecom: 1 window, with 5 panes
nadler: 1 window, with 3 panes
shopsystem-service: 1 window, with 2 panes

In order to achieve what you want, you need to create 1 session, with 3 windows.
session 0:

• window ecom, with 5 panes
• window nadler, with 3 panes
• window shopsystem-service, with 2 panes

You can create window with Ctrl+B, C, then rename the window using Ctrl+B, ,(comma).

[FernandoBasso]

I too have this “problem”.

This is my tmux state just before I save with C-b C-s:

Then, when I restore, I end up with this:

I save two sessions with C-b C-s. Then I kill the tmux server and start a new tmux session by simply typing tmux. Then, from that session, I restore the last saved stuff with C-b C-r, but I always end up with that initial session 0 besides my previously saved sessions.

$ tmux -V
tmux 3.0a

Last tmux-resurrect commit on my local tmux plugins directory:

commit 327c0481ad20c429b4e692e092659f8b3346b08forigin/HEAD)
Author: Bruno Sutic <code@brunosutic.com>
Date:   Sat Mar 21 23:51:28 2020 +0100

    Add 'view' to the list of restored processes

[jiaming10]

@FernandoBasso as far as I noticed, tmux-resurrect saves your sessions with the name. But when we run tmux, by default it will create a session, named 0. So when you restore, tmux-resurrect will restore the sessions but it will not overwrite the session 0. So you can try to start your tmux with a default name, matched with your saved session, then restore as usual.

tmux new -s dotfiles or tmux new -s proghowto

Edit: Fix second command example

[PhilippMeissner]

Can the ressurect command be run from outside a tmux session?

[FernandoBasso]

@FernandoBasso as far as I noticed, tmux-resurrect saves your sessions with the name. But when we run tmux, by default it will create a session, named 0. So when you restore, tmux-resurrect will restore the sessions but it will not overwrite the session 0. So you can try to start your tmux with a default name, matched with your saved session, then restore as usual.

tmux new -s dotfiles or tmux -s proghowto

Yeah, that works. Thanks.

I had somehow understood or assumed that tmux-resurrect would do away what that initial “dummy” session.

I considered a hook to kill that dummy session, but there doesn't seem to be a suitable one for that.

I can easily set a key binding too, but tmux new -s dotfiles is simple and good enough.

Thanks once more!

[jiaming10]

Can the ressurect command be run from outside a tmux session?

@PhilippMeissner As far as I tried, no. Because we can only issue the command ctrl-r inside tmux.

But after digging around, I found that we can directly run this script in .tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect/scripts/restore.sh. But the caveat is there must be a tmux session, so the situation that I mentioned above still applies.

[chrischen]

@FernandoBasso as far as I noticed, tmux-resurrect saves your sessions with the name. But when we run tmux, by default it will create a session, named 0. So when you restore, tmux-resurrect will restore the sessions but it will not overwrite the session 0. So you can try to start your tmux with a default name, matched with your saved session, then restore as usual.

tmux new -s dotfiles or tmux -s proghowto

Actually, even if you start tmux with a session name, it still creates a session 0 that is identical to the restored session in the "dotfiles" session in this case. This seems like a bug. So if you try that, and create tmux session named "dotfiles", and the C-b C-r, it will restore the session into session dotfiles but still create a session called 0.

[jiaming10]

Can you elaborate more, or what are the steps to reproduce? Because from the last reply of @FernandoBasso that is different from what you have described.

[chrischen]

@jiaming10 I figured out what was wrong. Apparently while doing extensive debugging I had saved a session with session id 0, so whenever I loaded the session that I wanted, 0 also kept getting restored. Deleting the sessions and re-saving without the unwanted sessions fixed it.

I'm going to guess the others have this similar issue. To confirm, check ~/.tmux/resurrect/last and see if any extra windows are there assigned to sessions you did not intend to save.

As a suggestion, maybe the behavior of saving session should only save the active session and keep sessions in different files?