tmux : config files are not used

Question

I use tmux (tmux 1.8) from Ubuntu 14.04. I wanted to configure it a bit via ~/.tmux.conf. But whatever I set inside this file my tmux session looks the same. Then I tried a fresh new /etc/tmux.conf but I still get the same display.

It seems that my config is hardcoded and that I cannot change it. If I remove these two files (~/.tmux.conf and /etc/tmux.conf) my tmux session is still the same. Tmux runs but I can not configure it. But it should be so simple...

Does anybody have already seen this? And how I could solve that? Do I need to compile a fresh new release of tmux?

Today, I have more details :

on one machine it works as expected. It's OK. But I did not changed anything! Strange...

But on another machine (also running Ubuntu same release and up2date like the first machine) it does not work. The file /etc/tmux.conf does not exist on none of these 2 machines. I put this little config file (~/.tmux.conf) :

# start Window Numbering at 2
set -g base-index 2

When I launch tmux on this second machine, window numbering starts at 0. On the first machine with the same config file, it behaves correctly : it starts at 2.
I'm going crazy!

What do you mean by "the same"? What are you trying to change, and in what way? Show us the configuration. — Kusalananda
after you changed your config file, have you tried starting new tmux session to check the difference? If you looked the existing session, it won't change, unless you reload the config in the session. (source-file command) — Kent

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-01T10:38:54

After you make changes to ~/.tmux.conf make sure tmux sources them with the tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf shell command.

tmux : config files are not used

3 Answers