Imagine you integrate tmux into your workflow such that you get very used to certain things being in certain places, perhaps a shell at the root of your code repository in window 1, Emacs in window 2, top in window 3, and so on. Now every time you reboot your machine, you spend some time to set up everything again, start a new session, create three windows, launch the programs in each window, and so on; there must be a better way. Of course there is!

tmux gives us some ways to configure things with nice defaults out of the box. We'll also see another way to do this later in Chapter 7, Using Other Tools with tmux, with a third-party utility.

So let's take the previous example and run through it. There are ways to make some of this happen within your .tmux.conf, file but it's generally more powerful to do it externally via a separate bash script. So hop into your favorite editor and start editing a new file named .tmux.defaults. You can name this file anything, so if...