Terminal multiplexers allow you to view multiple separate terminal sessions within a single terminal window. Tmux is my terminal multiplexer of choice, as it has more features than the 'original multiplexer' GNU Screen. The default setup gives you some information, but its appearance is, well...

Fortunately you can theme, or customize pretty much everything: From the colors to the information being shown in the status bar.

In order to make it easier to theme tmux, I split the tmux configuration file into two separate files. One file contains the main configuration ( ~/.tmux.conf ), and another file contains only theming (visual) variables ( ~/.tmux.THEMENAME.theme ). This setup makes it easier to switch different themes, without changing the main tmux configuration file.

As I wanted to automatically load a theme based on a shell environment variable, I added a small piece of code to the main tmux configuration file. This executes a shell command, which in turn loads the correct theme file.

run-shell "tmux source-file ~/.tmux.\${TMUX_THEME:-default}.theme"

The theme file is loaded dynamically, based on the environment variable $TMUX_THEME . If the environment variable is not set or empty, then the default theme is loaded: ~/.tmux.default.theme .

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Configuring Emacs (on Windows) to use the zsh shell can be tricky, especially when you use ( oh my zsh) plugins or fancy prompts. Emacs sets an environment variable when running a shell, which can be used to selectively disable plugins and change prompts. Configuring the SSH client and server to set and accept that variable makes ssh-ing inside Emacs to remote servers possible as well.