tmux

What This Skill Does

The tmux skill enables OpenClaw to spawn, manage, and interact with persistent terminal sessions. By programmatically controlling tmux, the agent can maintain stateful command-line interfaces, run long-duration coding agents, and scrape output from interactive TTYs. It is designed to bridge the gap between ephemeral task execution and long-running, stateful development workflows, allowing the agent to function as a persistent terminal operator.

Installation

You can integrate this capability by running the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/brennerspear/tmux-remote-control

Use Cases

• Parallel Coding Assistance: Run multiple instances of AI coding agents like Claude Code or Codex in isolated worktrees simultaneously without interference.
• Stateful REPL Interaction: Keep Python, Node, or database shells open across multiple turns, allowing the agent to persist session variables and environment state.
• Long-Running Process Management: Manage background tasks that require interactive monitoring or periodic checks on progress via pane scraping.
• Interactive TUI Automation: Automate inputs into complex CLI tools that require an interactive TTY, such as deployment dashboards or database migration tools.

Example Prompts

1. "Open a new tmux session named oc-auth-fix in the auth-service directory and start a python REPL in it."
2. "Check the status of the session oc-backend-migration; capture the last 200 lines and tell me if the migration is complete."
3. "Send the command 'git pull origin main' to the session oc-frontend-work and press enter."

Tips & Limitations

• Session Naming: Always use the oc-${project}-${feature} naming convention. This prevents name collisions and makes it trivial for you to find and attach to your sessions later using tmux ls.
• Interactive Apps: When using TUI apps, avoid sending 'Enter' immediately with text. Use a short delay (sleep 0.1) to ensure the input is parsed correctly by the host application.
• Server Defaults: Avoid using custom sockets. Stick to the default tmux server to ensure maximum compatibility with standard user terminal commands.
• Safety: This tool executes arbitrary shell commands inside your terminal. Ensure the environment is secured appropriately. Use tmux capture-pane to verify outputs rather than relying on assumed success.