Session name size in tmux's status bar

Published: October 7th 2026 (week 41 of 2026) in linux

If the default 10 characters are to few, status-left-length is the option you want to look at.

It took me some time to find. tmux(1) is one big man page, and it includes the configuration file documentation that technically should go into tmux.conf(5). Git does the same thing, though, its configuration is described by git-config(1), so I am not holding it against tmux.

By default, the session name is a short and sweet 10 characters. However, I find myself frequently using more. At some point I could not distinguish session names by the displayed prefix, and decided that it sucks, and I do not want to live like that.

nvim ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf

set-option -g status-left-length 24

I did not see any information about a limit tmux puts on the size of the status-left string. It appears you can set it to whatever you want.

<Prefix>:source-file ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf

Et voilà! The status line is now more useful.