tmux-cli
CLI utility to communicate with other CLI Agents or Scripts in other tmux panes; use it only when user asks you to communicate with other CLI Agents or Scripts in other tmux panes.
When & Why to Use This Skill
The tmux-cli skill is a specialized utility designed to empower Claude agents with terminal orchestration capabilities. It enables seamless communication and command execution across multiple tmux panes, allowing agents to interact with other CLI tools, scripts, or even other AI agents in real-time. By providing structured feedback like exit codes and output capture, it transforms a standard terminal into a multi-agent workspace for complex automation and development workflows.
Use Cases
- Multi-Agent Collaboration: Coordinating complex tasks by sending instructions and capturing responses between different AI agents running in separate tmux panes.
- Automated Testing and CI/CD: Running test suites or build scripts (e.g., 'npm test', 'make') in a dedicated pane and programmatically detecting success or failure via exit codes.
- Background Process Monitoring: Executing long-running services or servers in one pane while the agent continues to perform coding or debugging tasks in another.
- Environment Orchestration: Automating the setup of multi-pane development environments by sending specific configuration commands to targeted terminal sessions.
| name | tmux-cli |
|---|---|
| description | CLI utility to communicate with other CLI Agents or Scripts in other tmux panes; use it only when user asks you to communicate with other CLI Agents or Scripts in other tmux panes. |
tmux-cli
Instructions
Use the tmux-cli command to communicate with other CLI Agents or Scripts in
other tmux panes. Do tmux-cli --help to see how to use it!
This command depends on installing the claude-code-tools. If you get an error
indicating that the command is not available, ask the user to install it using:
uv tool install claude-code-tools.
Key Commands
Execute with Exit Code Detection
Use tmux-cli execute when you need to know if a shell command succeeded or
failed:
tmux-cli execute "make test" --pane=2
# Returns JSON: {"output": "...", "exit_code": 0}
tmux-cli execute "npm install" --pane=ops:1.3 --timeout=60
# Returns exit_code=0 on success, non-zero on failure, -1 on timeout
This is useful for:
- Running builds and knowing if they passed
- Running tests and detecting pass/fail
- Multi-step automation that should abort on failure
Note: execute is for shell commands only, not for agent-to-agent chat.
For communicating with another Claude Code instance, use send + wait_idle +
capture instead.