Change tmux key-binding for bash script

Question

We do have a bash script, which we can run on a cluster access node, that executes htop on all cluster child nodes, in order for us to monitor the whole cluster at once.

Now my question is, whether, there is a way to bind Ctrl-C or q for this script, without having to use the tmux prefix. The idea is, that this would make the script behave very similar to the regular htop command (which uses the q key binding to quit), and other users would not have to dive into the specifics of how to use tmux, when wanting to quit the window.

I am aware, that there is a way to change the behaviour using the .tmux.conf file. However, we do not want to set these keybinding globally, but only for this single script.

The command bash script looks like this:

tmux new -s logs_htop -d ssh-run htop 1
tmux select-pane -T 'cn01'

tmux splitw -v -p 50 -t logs_htop:0.0 ssh-run htop 5
tmux select-pane -T 'cn05'

tmux splitw -h -p 75 -t logs_htop:0.0 ssh-run htop 2
tmux select-pane -T 'cn02'

tmux splitw -h -p 66 -t logs_htop:0.1 ssh-run htop 3
tmux select-pane -T 'cn03'

tmux splitw -h -p 50 -t logs_htop:0.2 ssh-run htop 4
tmux select-pane -T 'cn04'

tmux splitw -h -p 75 -t logs_htop:0.4 ssh-run htop 6
tmux select-pane -T 'cn06'

tmux splitw -h -p 66 -t logs_htop:0.5 ssh-run htop 7
tmux select-pane -T 'cn07'

tmux splitw -h -p 50 -t logs_htop:0.6 "watch squeue -al"
tmux select-pane -T 'squeue'

tmux attach -t logs_htop

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible by connecting to a different tmux socket with a custom tmux config file.

First, create your custom tmux keybind in a separate conf file:

mkdir -p /etc/tmux
echo "bind-key -n C-c kill-session" > /etc/tmux/tmux-logs-htop.conf
# do not recommend q as htop is context-sensitive and q does not *always* mean quit
echo "bind-key -n q kill-session" >> /etc/tmux/tmux-logs-htop.conf

Next, create your custom tmux server:

tmux -L logs_htop -f /etc/tmux/tmux-logs-htop.conf

Lastly, edit your script to prefix every command with the particular socket / tmux server the commands are going to:

tmux -L logs_htop new -s logs_htop -d ssh-run htop 1 
...

---

From man tmux:

-L socket-name
 tmux stores the server socket in a directory under TMUX_TMPDIR or /tmp if it is unset.
 The default socket is named default.  This option allows a different socket name to be
 specified, allowing several independent tmux servers to be run.  Unlike -S a full path is
 not necessary: the sockets are all created in the same directory.