Catmux is a little helper to run a tmux session with multiple windows and panes with just one command. It is inspired and functionally very similar to tmuxinator, but without the project management feature which is in my opinion kind of an overhead.
Session configs can be stored anywhere and have to given as an argument.
This package is currently in development phase. It's interface might completely change and/or functionality might be moved around or even removed without notice. Use it at your own risks and report issues and problems :)
However, by now it has been used productively in four different projects by different people without problems, so I would consider it 'working'.
If you try out catmux and you find anything you're missing, anything that doesn't work as expected, or is clearly a bug, please create an issue here, I'll be happy to answer to them. Of course, merge requests are always welcome, as well :)
In most of our ROS projects at work we use shell output for almost all nodes to get log information during runtime. Having all this in one window where you start your "Start it all"-launchfile makes it very hard to follow the log of a specific node. Starting everything in separate windows is quite a lot of work and requires documentation overhead in sense of documenting which launchfiles or nodes have to be started.
At a conference I caught the idea to use tmux scripting to orchestrate all this in one tmux session. However, quickly I noticed that creating these scripts is a daunting task as you'll have to type in a lot of commands over and over again and as soon as you wanted to do things a little different such as not starting a particular launchfile if a certain parameter was set, things got complicated.
I liked the yaml-syntax of tmuxinator, but that tool didn't quite hit the spot. I wanted to have something that can be easily integrated into a ROS project and I definitely wanted something that saves the config per project and not all configs at one central spot on a particular machine.
As catmux is designed as a catkin package, simply clone it into your catkin-workspace, build it and you're done.
Currently, there is no full-blown documentation, but the example config file in
etc/example_session.yaml gives a detailed insight on possible commands.
to simply run the example, type
rosrun catmux create_session package://catmux/etc/example_session.yaml
To see further options, simply run it with argument -h:
$ rosrun catmux create_session -h
usage: create_session [-h] [-n SESSION_NAME] [-t TMUX_CONFIG] [-d]
[--overwrite OVERWRITE]
session_config
Create a new catmux session
positional arguments:
session_config Session configuration. Should be a yaml-file.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-n SESSION_NAME, --session_name SESSION_NAME
Name used for the tmux session
-t TMUX_CONFIG, --tmux_config TMUX_CONFIG
This config will be used for the tmux session
-d, --detach Start session in detached mode
--overwrite OVERWRITE
Overwrite a parameter from the session config.
Parameters can be specified using a comma-separated
list such as '--overwrite param_a=1,param_b=2'.
To make use of all catmux features, run the following example command:
rosrun catmux create_session package://catmux/etc/example_session.yaml --tmux_config package://catmux/etc/tmux_default.conf --session_name example_session --overwrite show_layouts=True,replacement_param="new catmux user"
If you are not that familiar with tmux: To kill a session, simply type tmux kill-session in any
terminal window. In the etc/tmux_default.conf there is a key-binding for that, see
etc/readme_tmux.txt for details.