Ownership and cleanup

A tmux session, window, or pane normally remains until you kill it. Scope-based cleanup can kill it when your code leaves a block, including after an exception. See Workspaces for a temporary layout example.

Defer cleanup with a fresh context¶

A SSession, SWindow, or SPane handle does not own its tmux object. Dropping the value leaves tmux running. Register cleanup after successful creation and use a separate, bounded context so cancellation of the work cannot prevent cleanup. Return cleanup failures along with any work failure:

func temporarySession(ctx context.Context, server tmux.Server) (err error) {
    session, err := server.NewSession(ctx, tmux.NewSessionRequest{})
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    defer func() {
        cleanup, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), time.Second)
        defer cancel()
        err = errors.Join(err, session.Kill(cleanup))
    }()
    _, err = session.SearchWindows(ctx, nil)
    return err
}

This function uses context, errors, time, and the tmux package. It owns only the session it creates. Do not kill a shared server as session cleanup.

SControlClient, SPaneObservation, and SNotificationStream implement io.Closer. Close those resources separately from killing tmux objects. For tests, ftmuxtest.NewServer registers isolated server cleanup with the Go test runner.

Testing cleanup¶

Use explicit cleanup for objects whose handles have no disposal hook. For an entire disposable test server, prefer your port’s test fixture or server guard; see Testing with libtmux.