Use tmux and magic wormhole to get things from your remote computer to your tmux. If tmux has DISPLAY set, open the file locally!

Demo

Usage

• On your remote computer, display the magic wormhole code.
• Press ( prefix + w )
• Hit OK to transfer.

Prerequisites

tmux-wormhole is written in Go. To install tmux-wormhole successfully, you'll need Go version 1.13 or higher.

Setup with Tmux Plugin Manager

Set up this plugin via TPM by adding this to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'gcla/tmux-wormhole'

Install the plugin by hitting prefix + I.

Setup Manually

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/gcla/tmux-wormhole ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-wormhole

Compile it:

cd ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-wormhole
GO11MODULE=on go build -o tmux-wormhole cmd/tmux-wormhole/main.go

Source it by adding this to your ~/.tmux.conf:

run-shell ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-wormhole/tmux-wormhole.tmux

Reload TMUX's config with:

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Configuration

Set these in your ~/.tmux.conf file.

• @wormhole-key - how to launch tmux-wormhole (default: w)
• @wormhole-save-folder - where to keep transferred files and directories (default: XDG download dir e.g. ~/Downloads/)
• @wormhole-open-cmd - run this command after a file is transferred (default: xdg-open or open)
• @wormhole-no-default-open - just transfer, don't run anything afterwards (default: false)
• @wormhole-no-ask-to-open - after a file is transferred, ask the user interactively if the file should be opened (default: false)
• @wormhole-can-overwrite - allow tmux-wormhole to overwite a file or directory of the same name locally (default: false)

How does it work

The plugin uses sleight of hand to make it look as though its prompts are being displayed over the active pane. When you hit the tmux-wormhole hotkey, the plugin does the following:

• saves the contents of the active pane to a temporary file e.g. /tmp/wormhole
• launches a new tmux session called wormhole, with...
• a pane running cat /tmp/wormhole ; sleep infinity

If you were to attach to the wormhole session, this pane should look like the currently active pane. Next the plugin will:

• create a new window called wormhole-ABC in the active session
• with a single pane running the Go program tmux-wormhole
• tmux-wormhole is a gowid application that overlays a dialog widget on top of a terminal widget. The terminal widget runs tmux attach -L wormhole

Finally, the plugin swaps the currently active pane with the pane from wormhole-ABC.

The effect is that the terminal now has a yellow dialog overlaid.

Sources

• tmux-thumbs for the project structure which I freely plagiarized!
• wormhole-william - a GoLang implementation of magic wormhole
• gowid - my Go TUI framework, which itself heavily depends on...
• tcell - like ncurses for GoLang

License

MIT