This is a tmux theme that recreates the look and feel of GUI tabs via powerline
symbols. By default, it uses the Solarized Light colors; but all colors can be
configured, and the powerline symbols are optional. This is what it looks like:
To install this plugin with tpm, add this to your tmux.conf:
set -g @plugin 'jabirali/tmux-powertab'
The statusline background color is by default set to #1d1d1d to fit well with a
surrounding Ubuntu desktop when run in a borderless terminal, but should look fine
in other settings too. The theme itself sets the background color of each tmux
pane to, so I'd recommend setting your terminal background color to a matching
#1d1d1d to avoid a bright white line around the tab bar. The top right
corner of the setup shows the current hostname and session name.
By default, the powerline symbols are disabled. This is because they require that you use
a patched font, and that they require Unicode support that may not work on old hosts.
However, when properly setup, the tab line arguably looks much better with these enabled.
To add the powerline tab edges as shown in the screenshot, add this to your tmux.conf:
set -g @powertab-powerline 'on'
In tmux, you can manually rename a tab using the keybinding Ctrl+b ,.
However, not everyone likes to do this, in which case this plugin can help you automatically rename tabs.
The way it works, is that it lets tmux name a tab based on the running process if you're in your
home folder, as is likely to be the case for system monitors, music players, mail clients, etc.
However, once you cd to some other folder (e.g. a project you're working on), that is used as
the tab name instead, preventing you from having 10 tabs open that are all named vim.
To activate this feature, add the following setting to your tmux.conf:
set -g @powertab-pathname on
If you don't like Solarized Light, the colors are also customizable. You can customize the color of the foreground (text), background, statusline (tab line), unfocused tab background, unfocused tab foreground, the inactive and active pane borders, and the right statusline background and foreground.
The main theme colors you can configure are powertab-foreground, powertab-background,
powertab-statusline, and powertab-unfocustab_bg. The names should be self-explanatory.
If you set these 4 main colors, the rest of the UI elements are automatically recolored.
To set these, add something like this to your tmux.conf:
set -g @powertab-foreground '#1d1d1d'
The argument should be a hexadecimal color value. Replace the word foreground in the
example above with any of the other attributes you'd like to customize.
If you want to customize further, you can also manually change the options
unfocustab_fg, focustab_fg, statuslineright_bg, statuslineright_fg, all
prefixed with powertab-. If left unset, these are automatically set to
sensible values based on the 4 main colors mentioned above.
By default, the color of the pane borders are matched to the statusline colors. This means that
both active and inactive tmux panes are separated by a homogeneously colored grid, a setup that
works quite well if you track focus via the terminal cursor instead of the pane border colors.
This behaviour is however customizable. If you set powertab-paneborder to fg or bg, these
borders will be colored according to the foreground or background theme color, respectively.
Note that setting this to bg is effectively the same as disabling pane borders entirely.
If you set it to auto, it will use fg for active panes and bg for inactive panes.
Finally, if you set powertab-paneborder and powertab-activepaneborder to colors,
you can manually control exactly what colors these parts of the interface have.