tmux, split-window and pwd

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with tmux as kind of an alternative/addon/… to iTerm2 and my terminal-focused work-style in general. One things that drove me nuts again and again is that – for some reason – I could never get the split-window command to respect my current working directory. I tried the first two solutions mentioned on the ArchLinux-wiki but the second simply did clash too much with how I’m using split-window and the first solution didn’t work at all (for some reason PWD didn’t propagate correctly and so default-path always defaulted back to the cwd of tmux’ parent shell).

With all other options gone I started to look into the third solution. This one involved extracting the PWD from the pane’s shell from the outside via /proc. But since I’m working on OSX, this doesn’t work quite like this.

---

The main differences here are that I can’t use /proc to look for the PWD but have to rely on lsof and that ps doesn’t have a forest-rendering. So the resulting script looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
=begin
Helper script for tmux' split-window command that retains the original PWD
This script is based on https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tmux#.2Fproc_method
=end
SHELL = 'reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh'


session_id, window_id, pane_id = `tmux display-message -p "#S:#I:#P"`.chomp.split(/:/)
tty = nil
in_sessions = false
in_right_session = false
in_right_window = false
in_right_pane = false

# First step is to find our tty
`tmux server-info`.each_line do |line|
    break if line.start_with? 'Terminals'
    if line.start_with? 'Sessions: '
        in_sessions = true
        next
    end
    if in_sessions and line =~ /^\s\d+: #{session_id}: \d+ window..*[flags=.*]/
        in_right_session = true
        next
    end   
    if in_right_session and line =~ /^\s{3}#{window_id}:/
        in_right_window = true
        next
    end
    if in_right_window and line =~ /^\s*#{pane_id}: \/dev\/(\S+) /
        tty = $1
        break
    end
end

raise "No matching tty found" if tty.nil?

# Now let's find the process with this tty
pid = `ps -t #{tty}`.split($/)[1].split(' ')[0]

# ... and now its PWD
pwd = `lsof -a -d cwd -p #{pid} -F n`.split($/)[1][1..-1]
args = ARGV * " "

# Let's put it all together by calling split-window with the shell and the path
`tmux split-window #{args} 'cd #{pwd}; #{SHELL}'`

Gist

Thankfully, getting access to a process’ PWD is pretty straight forward with lsof -d cwd and ps has a nice shortcut for filtering for a specific tty. And yes, I know that the tty-scanning is really rocky up there and this is probably the one part of this script that will evolve over time. The solution for the missing “–forest” support is also not perfect yet, but so far it works just fine for me :-)

So, once you’ve put this script somewhere in your path (for me that ~/.local/bin/split-in-cwd.rb) and made it executable, all that is left to do, is to add it to your split-window bindings:

unbind s
bind s run '~/.local/bin/split-in-cwd.rb -v'
unbind v
bind v run '~/.local/bin/split-in-cwd.rb -h'