tmux plugins galore

I don’t know if tmux is getting more popular or if it’s just so much easier to publish a tmux plugin or some combination of the two, but I’m amazed at how many people are putting out new tmux plugins. I casually watch tmux-plugins/list to see what’s going on in that space. As of today there are 35 open pull requests against the list with almost all being new plugins added in 2026.

A lot (but not all) of these plugins are related in some way to LLMs and their agents, so it’s interesting to see how LLMs have invigorated (of all places) tmux development.

One part of me wants to try out some interesting plugins, but another part of me is wary of adding a lot of stuff to my dev environment that I cannot guarantee does not currently or won’t in future contain some kind of exploit. The way you install the plugins is generally some form of cloning a repo and then hoping for the best. It’s getting hard to distinguish between well meaning author and bad actor playing the long game. Sure, I could run scans on all of this stuff myself, but I find myself wanting some kind of signing mechanism that says “this has been scanned and it’s probably ok”.

All of this was a lot more fun when you didn’t need to be as cynical (or at least you felt like you didn’t need to be). You know when people tell you that they grew up in some place where they didn’t lock the doors at night? That’s the Internet I long for.

"Easter Wish List" by Ian Muttoo is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

While we’re on the topic of terminal apps, I was watching Paul Johnson share a screen yesterday. He is using cmux which looked just beautiful, in the way that a terminal might look beautiful. You know what I mean. I suppose that should be on my TODO list of things to try out. I notice he didn’t share this one at The Great Perl Toolchain Summit CLI Throwdown 2026. I’ll have to check in with him more frequently to keep up with his terminal tweaks.