Installing
Many platforms provide prebuilt packages of tmux, although these are often out of date. Details of the commands to discover and install these can be found in the documentation for the platform package management tools, for example:
| Platform | Install Command |
|---|---|
| Arch Linux | pacman -S tmux |
| Debian or Ubuntu | apt install tmux |
| Fedora | dnf install tmux |
| RHEL or CentOS | yum install tmux |
| macOS (using Homebrew) | brew install tmux |
| macOS (using MacPorts) | port install tmux |
| openSUSE | zypper install tmux |
Some thirdparty binary packages are available: AppImage and RPMs.
tmux requires two libraries to be available:
In addition, tmux requires a C compiler, make, yacc (or bison) and pkg-config.
On most platforms, these are available as packages. This table lists the packages needed to run or to buld tmux:
| Platform | Command | Run Packages | Build Packages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian | apt-get install |
libevent ncurses |
libevent-dev ncurses-dev build-essential bison pkg-config |
| RHEL or CentOS | yum install |
libevent ncurses |
libevent-devel ncurses-devel gcc make bison pkg-config |
If libevent and ncurses are not available as packages, they can be built from source, see this section.
tmux uses autoconf so it provides a configure script. To build and install
into /usr/local using sudo, run:
tar -zxf tmux-*.tar.gz
cd tmux-*/
./configure
make && sudo make install
To install elsewhere add --prefix to configure, for example for /usr add
--prefix=/usr.
If the dependencies are not available, they can be built from source and installed locally. This is not recommended if the dependencies can be installed from system packages.
Building requires a C compiler, make, automake, autoconf and pkg-config to be installed. It is more common to need to build libevent than ncurses.
Full instructions can be found on the project sites but this is a summary of
how to install libevent and ncurses into ~/local for a single user. To
install system-wide into directories under /opt or into /usr/local,
substitute the required path for for $HOME/local in each case and run make install as root (for example with sudo: make && sudo make install).
For libevent:
tar -zxf libevent-*.tar.gz
cd libevent-*/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local --enable-shared
make && make install
For ncurses:
tar -zxf ncurses-*.tar.gz
cd ncurses-*/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/local --with-shared --with-termlib --enable-pc-files --with-pkg-config-libdir=$HOME/local/lib/pkgconfig
make && make install
Then the tmux configure script needs to be pointed to the local libraries
using PKG_CONFIG_PATH:
tar -zxf tmux-*.tar.gz
cd tmux-*/
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make && make install
If ncurses and libevent were installed in different directories rather than all
together in ~/local, both their lib/pkgconfig directories will need to be
in PKG_CONFIG_PATH, for example:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/libevent/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/ncurses/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
The newly built tmux can be found in ~/local/bin/tmux.
When tmux is installed locally on Linux, the runtime linker may need to be told
where to find the libraries using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable,
for example:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/lib $HOME/local/bin/tmux -V
And to view the manual page, MANPATH must be set:
MANPATH=$HOME/local/share/man man tmux
Most users will want to configure these in a shell profile, for example in
.profile for ksh or .bash_profile for bash:
export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export MANPATH=$HOME/local/share/man:$MANPATH
Building tmux from Git has the same dependencies as building from tarball plus
also autoconf and automake. Building is the same as from a tarball except first
the configure script must be generated. To install into /usr/local:
git clone https://github.com/tmux/tmux.git
cd tmux
sh autogen.sh
./configure
make && sudo make install
tmux provides a few configure options:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
--enable-debug |
Build with debug symbols |
--enable-static |
Create a static build |
--enable-utempter |
Use the utempter library if it is installed |
--enable-utf8proc |
Use the utf8proc library if it is installed |
The libevent library or its headers are not installed. Make sure the
appropriate packages are installed (some platforms split libraries from headers
into a -dev or -devel package).
macOS's builtin UTF-8 support is very poor, so it is best to use the
utf8proc library if possible. Once
it is installed, pass --enable-utf8proc to configure.
To force tmux to build without utf8proc, use --disable-utf8proc.
On Linux, make sure LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set, or try a static build instead
(give --enable-static to configure).
Make sure pkg-config is installed.
Either no C compiler (gcc, clang) is installed, or it doesn't work - check
there is nothing stupid in CFLAGS or CPPFLAGS.
Instructions and scripts on building an AppImage package for tmux are available from Nelson Enzo here. Prebuilt AppImage packages are also available here.
A Docker install script is available here.
The tmux packages available from the main repositories are often quite out of date, especially for long-term support distributions. RPMs for newer tmux versions can be obtained from here.
For example to set up a repository and install on RHEL8:
sudo yum install http://galaxy4.net/repo/galaxy4-release-8-current.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install tmux
Or to install an RPM directly on RHEL6:
sudo rpm -ivh http://galaxy4.net/repo/RHEL/6/x86_64/tmux-3.1b-2.el6.x86_64.rpm
The repository method is recommended to automatically receive future package updates. See this page for more details.