In Chapter 5, Diving Deeper, we touched a bit on starting tmux with some default session configuration in the Launch with defaults section.

You may have noticed that even a rather simple configuration turned out to be a bit complex and tricky. This is one of those areas of core tmux that leaves a little to be desired.

Thankfully, the open source world has stepped up to the plate and created an excellent utility called tmuxinator to make this kind of configuration far simpler.

Built in ruby, tmuxinator is easy to install and provides a ton of useful capability. It does so by allowing you to specify in a simple and intuitive YAML syntax how you'd like your window laid out, any programs that should be run on launch, and more. tmuxinator allows you to create hooks that run before any window configuration is run and makes it much, much easier to specify a set of default windows and panes than in core tmux.

Let's run through the workflow of installing...