Guides
Guides are where you land once you know roughly what you want to do and need a walkthrough rather than a mental model or a reference page. If you haven’t yet decided which port fits your project, or you’re unsure what “control mode” or “filtering” mean in this ecosystem, start with Concepts instead — this section assumes you’ve read that or don’t need it.
- Getting started — install tmux, pick a port, and run the smallest thing that proves your setup works: open a session, send a command, read back what it printed.
- Attaching to tmux — which socket a plain constructor call actually reaches, and how to find a session that might already exist instead of always creating a new one.
- Sending keys — the difference between typing
and pressing Enter, why a command can outrun the shell that’s about to
run it, and how each port’s
send_keysactually spells “literal text.” - Capturing output — the visible pane versus
its scrollback, why polling
capture_panein a loop is the wrong default once a port gives you something better, and how to wait for text instead of guessing how long a command takes. - Filtering and querying, in practice — the how-to companion to Filtering and queries: finding the one pane you mean, and what each port does when zero or several match.
- Testing with libtmux — every port ships a way to give your own tests a real, disposable tmux server. What each one hands you, and what it guarantees about cleanup.
Each guide links out to Examples for the literal, sourced code behind whatever it discusses — a guide is where the tradeoffs and the gotchas live; the tested snippet lives on the example page.