In order to keep the settings around after restarting tmux, we will create a configuration file that will include all the information about what options we want to set and to what values.

Like many other Unix-based utilities, configuring tmux is as simple as creating a file with the name .tmux.conf in your home directory.

However, unlike many other configuration files, a tmux configuration file does not contain some kind of specific configuration language for the program, rather it consists of a series of tmux commands that are run, in order, when tmux starts up. Most of the commands we'll see are simple set-option commands similar to the commands we played with in the previous examples. Let's create and start building our configuration file:

$ cd ~
$ touch .tmux.conf

Open this newly created file in your favorite text editor and we're ready to rock!