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Ashimema
Asked: 2013-05-17 10:44:16 +0800 CST

How do I change the default shell used in Byobu (tmux)?

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I've become addicted to Byobu and I've recently shifted from bash to zsh; Now I want to combine the two, however I have a one initial pre-requisite:

I cannot make zsh the default shell for my user as it's a shared account and the rest of the team aren't as zsh happy as I am - That rules out the 'chsh -s /bin/zsh' option.

So, I discovered you can set a default-shell for tmux (which should follow across to byobu right?). That would be perfect as I'm also the only one really using Byobu on the server.

Problem is, I can't work out where to enable this option in the confusion of config files that's created in the tmux/byobu mix.

Any hints?

byobu

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Put the following in your $HOME/.byobu/.tmux.conf:

    set -g default-shell /usr/bin/zsh
set -g default-command /usr/bin/zsh

    Full disclosure: I'm the author and maintainer of Byobu.

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  2. For me, Dustin's solution didn't seem to take at first.
    If anyone is in the same boat, you might want to read this.
    I used to have a working setup where gnome-terminal launched zsh as a login shell, which then launched byobu with my window (split) setup and a couple of zsh instances in there. After a distro reinstall, the shell instances in the splits were suddenly bash, for whatever reason, even with the above fix.
    Whenever I launched zsh in those splits I'd get a message from oh-my-zsh that a plugin was missing.
    I installed the missing package for the plugin and configured it correctly, and now all stages of the setup execute correctly. I suspect that the error message from the sourcing process whithin oh-my-zsh may have caused a fallback to bash (possibly within tmux?).

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