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Installing and setting up tmux on Mac OS Lion

Posted by: on Oct 6, 2011 | 5 Comments

I’ve been using a lot more command line tools at work and i’ve gotten accustomed to a certain setup. Tmux is an updated BSD version of screen, a terminal multiplexer. Sadly, Mac OS does not ship with this out of the box. Fortunately it is pretty simple to install. On my latest version of Mac OS X Lion (as of 10/6/2011) all I needed was the following:

  • Install libevent
If you do a quick google search you can find and download libevent here.
Extract it and compile the source. Pretty straightforward, just follow the standard package build commands:
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
  • Install tmux
You can find the source for tmux here
Once extracting it, follow the same steps as above to compile.
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
You may encounter an issue when you build and you’ll get an error regarding unable to find symbols for x86_64. Quick google search finds that if you add -lresolv to the linker you can get past this. So just copy the last outputted gcc line and add -lresolve to the end and run. It should build and you can then type ‘sudo make install’ to finish the process. When you are finished you should be able to access tmux. Test it:
tmux --help

There are many guides to tmux available. You’ll want to setup your tmux config at ~/.tmux.conf. Hopefully this will bring you one step closer to Mac command line bliss.

5 Comments

  1. coelmay
    November 18, 2011

    HA! Scanned over this and almost missed the bit that solved my problem

    …if you add -lresolv to the linker…

    Thanks to this I am now able to use tmux.

  2. Dan
    November 21, 2011

    I was actually worried that people might miss that, I’ll go ahead and make that bigger and bold it.

  3. Simon Robins
    December 19, 2011

    Adding -lresolve didn’t work for me but following the instructions here did: http://floriancrouzat.net/2010/07/compile-and-run-tmux-with-mouse-support-in-mac-os-x-terminal-app/

  4. amree
    January 8, 2012

    add -lresolv to the linker

    Works for me too

  5. Alain Ravet
    February 1, 2012

    If Homebrew installed on your system all you need is :

    $ brew install tmux

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