Since using lots of Vim sessions in a terminal I had a brief dalliance with Nova (I did/do like it, but it’s not cross-platform) and then ended up with Helix. At work I tend to use Helix in the same way I was using Vim but instead of Terminal.app it’s Alacritty with one huuuuge Tmux session with multiple windows (“tabs”) per each Git repository I’m working on. I haven’t bothered figuring out renaming the tmux windows automatically and just rename them manually - it tends to be a very long running Tmux session that I also save and restore so renaming manually is a one-time thing. It is easy to find whichever repo I want (across 70+ windows) by using CTRL, b, w to bring up Tmux’s window search and then using / to search for the name I want.
Since starting to play about with AI clis, I’ll split the Tmux window so I have a pane for running the cli in and a pane for Helix. But I won’t be running an AI cli in all of these windows which has lead me to wonder, “How do I find where I’m running AI clis?”.
What I’ve done is add a simple wrapper to the AI cli command to set and unset Tmux window titles on launch and quit of the AI cli:
function ai {
# Let me know where I'm running an AI cli session
# Find tmux window this command was called from
# This way can target window.
# And avoid racey style stuff where wrong "current window" gets renamed
twin=$(tmux list-panes -a | grep "$TMUX_PANE " | cut -d : -f 2 | cut -d . -f 1)
twse=$(tmux list-panes -a | grep "$TMUX_PANE " | cut -d : -f 1)
# I don't think I'd ever use an asterisk as a window name, but this would fallover if I did
twnm=$(tmux list-windows -a | grep "$twse:$twin:" | cut -d : -f 3 | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | cut -d '*' -f 1)
tmux rename-window -t $twin "$twnm + ai"
/path/to/ai/cli
tmux rename-window -t $twin $twnm
}
And now I can easily search through my Tmux windows.