What is the right way to launch tmux in Terminal.app on OS X

Question

I have ...

if [ "$TMUX" = "" ]; then tmux; fi

... in my .zshrc which works great for ssh connections.

However, I have trouble with Terminal.app.

When I type exit, tmux closes, but I am left in an open window that says [exited].

I have to type exit again to close the window.

How do I invoke tmux in Terminal.app to avoid having to type exit twice?

Answer 1

The way you're currently doing it, you need to exit again because you're running tmux as a child process of the shell.

IIRC, you need to replace the current shell process via exec instead, like so:

if [ "$TMUX" = "" ]; then exec tmux; fi

Answer 2

For someone stumbling upon it in the future - how I did it was as follows:

1. Start Terminal.app
2. Open Preferences
3. Go to "Profile" -> "Shell"
4. In the "Start" section select "Execute command" and enter exec tmux (make sure run in own shell is also selected)