One keystroke to a project: building a tmux session launcher with fzf

I hit Ctrl-F more than any other key combination on this machine. It runs a shell function called fts — "find tmux session," which is not a good name but it's four years too late to change it. I press it, a fuzzy finder opens listing every project directory I have, I type a few characters, and I'm sitting in a tmux session for that project with the panes already laid out. If the session already existed, I'm back in it exactly where I left off. If what I typed doesn't exist yet, it offers to create it. Somebody watched me do this over a screen share recently and asked what was going on. So: here's the whole thing, the four tools it's built on, and a breakdown of every part that isn't obvious. What you'll end up with: One keystroke from anywhere to any project Fuzzy search across every repo you own, with a live directory tree preview Type a name that doesn't exist → it offers to scaffold and place it Never accidentally start a second tmux session for a project you already have open The same window/pane layout in every project, every time The problem it solves Before this, starting work looked like: cd ~/repo/work/some-project-i-half-remember-the-name-of tmux new-session -s some-project # split some panes, badly, slightly differently each time Three or four commands, one of which needed me to remember a path. None of it hard. All of it friction at exactly the wrong moment — the moment you've decided to start something, which is the moment you're most likely to get distracted instead. I'd also collected tmux sessions named 0 , 1 , 2 and some-project-2 , because I kept starting new ones instead of attaching to the one already running. So the goal wasn't really speed. It was making the right thing the automatic thing. Prerequisites Four tools plus zsh. All four are worth having on their own, and three of them are things you'll reach for daily once installed. Tool Version I'm on What it does here tmux 3.6a The terminal multiplexer. Holds the sessions, windows and panes. fz