Fixing tmux Scroll Jumping on Typing

Super annoying issue today. Every time I typed in tmux, the scroll position kept jumping up randomly.

The problem

Typing anything would cause the terminal to flicker and scroll position to jump. Made it impossible to work comfortably.

Finding the cause

Dug through my .tmux.conf and found the culprit:

set -g status-interval 1

Status bar was refreshing every single second. Combined with Catppuccin theme showing cpu, weather, battery, and directory - that’s a lot of refreshing.

set -g @catppuccin_status_modules_right "directory cpu weather battery date_time"

Each refresh was causing the terminal to redraw, which messed with scroll position.

The fix

1. Bumped status interval to 60 seconds (only showing time anyway):

set -g status-interval 60

2. Removed cpu/weather/battery from status bar:

set -g @catppuccin_status_modules_right "directory date_time"

3. Removed unused plugins:

# Removed these lines
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-cpu'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-battery'
set -g @plugin 'Morantron/tmux-fingers'

4. Turned off monitor-activity:

setw -g monitor-activity off

Gotchas

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf wasn’t enough. Had to kill the entire tmux server:

tmux kill-server && tmux

Plugins stay loaded in memory even after config reload. Full restart was needed to actually remove them.