Quickstart starts tmux with the CLI before using libtmux

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
65/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the "Open a tmux session" section of README.md (around L87-93) and the "Start a tmux session" section of docs/quickstart.md (around L107-116), then read the libtmux.Server() examples that follow them. In both files, replace the tmux new-session step with libtmux.Server().new_session(session_name="foo", window_name="bar") and keep the tmux attach -t foo command as an optional step. Done when both pages create the session from Python. Leave the libtmux.org launcher and any new context-manager API out of scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

The README and docs/quickstart.md start with "First, start a tmux session to connect to" and a tmux new-session command, then use libtmux.Server(). libtmux can create that session itself. The maintainer asked on 2026-11-14 that ports not send users to a shell script when the library could do the job. Severity is low: the quickstart's point is piloting a session the reader attaches to in another terminal, so the shell command is part of the story.

Expected
  • The quickstart creates the session from Python: server = libtmux.Server(); session = server.new_session(session_name="foo", window_name="bar"), then tells the reader how to attach (tmux attach -t foo) as an optional step.
  • The libtmux.org "Attaching to tmux" program creates work itself and connects a second Server handle to the same socket.
Actual
  • README.md L91: tmux new-session -s foo -n bar under "Open a tmux session".
  • docs/quickstart.md L111: tmux new-session -n bar -s foo under "Start a tmux session", with the tutorial using session foo and window bar.
  • libtmux.org (libtmux/docs) shows a run.sh launcher on the Python "Attaching to tmux" guide (ports/py/guides/attaching-to-tmux.md L50-76) and an environment scrub before the landing example (home-examples.json L24). The Python landing program does not need either: it uses libtmux.Server(socket_path=..., config_file="/dev/null"), new_session, and cleans up in finally.
Proposal

None. Server.new_session, Server.kill, Server(socket_path=..., config_file=...) exist. Optional: a public, non-pytest context manager for a private server (the pytest plugin's TestServer is test-only), for example libtmux.Server.private(root=None, config_file="/dev/null") that creates a temp directory, yields a Server, kills it and removes the directory on exit.

References
  • Maintainer, 2026-11-14: "don't spam shell script to users"; file an issue per repo and name the missing APIs.
  • libtmux/docs launcher issue; related existing issues tmux-python/libtmux#804 (create or reuse tmux resources with explicit cleanup ownership) and #823.
Dominant language
Python
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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