I’ve become addicted to tmux, the terminal multiplexer. It lets me turn one terminal window into a multi-tabbed, multi-paned hub for all my terminal-based exploits.

I’ve been mulling for a while if there is a way to emulate Cluster SSH using tmux, being able to type a command once and have it be executed in multiple sessions on different servers. I spent a few hours today Googling for ideas on how to do such a thing, stumbling across a gist that seemed to do something close to what I want, then sinking some more effort into adapting it to my needs. The result worked, but was a bit messy.

While trying to clean up my solution, I did some searching in the tmux man page. In order to understand what I was reading, I had to page back to review the section header and stumbled upon the synchronize-panes window option. It was exactly the functionality I was looking for, already baked into tmux.

So my New Year’s resolution is to spend less time Googling and more time reading the official documentation. Instead of waiting until I need some specific feature, I’m going to set aside a little time every day to get a broader view on the tools I rely on to be productive.