Building tmux from source

Building tmux from source | Generated by AI

Home 2026.06

Here’s the full build process:

Problem: tmux not installed, brew too slow, building from source needed.

Dependencies discovered:

tmux requires: libevent, ncurses
macOS 13 (Ventura) doesn’t ship ncurses headers in /usr/include anymore
libevent not installed at all
Xcode CommandLineTools present (gcc, make available)

Step 1: Download source tarballs

cd ~/tmp-build
curl -fSL -o libevent-2.1.12-stable.tar.gz \
  https://github.com/libevent/libevent/releases/download/release-2.1.12-stable/libevent-2.1.12-stable.tar.gz
curl -fSL -o tmux-3.7.tar.gz \
  https://github.com/tmux/tmux/releases/download/3.7/tmux-3.7.tar.gz

Step 2: Build libevent (~30 seconds)

cd libevent-2.1.12-stable
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local --disable-shared --disable-openssl
make -j4
make install

--disable-shared — static libs only (.a files), no .dylib needed at runtime
--disable-openssl — tmux doesn’t need it, skip the dependency
Installs to ~/.local/lib/libevent*.a and ~/.local/include/event2/

Step 3: Build tmux (~20 seconds)

cd tmux-3.7
SDK=$(xcrun --show-sdk-path)
CFLAGS="-I$HOME/.local/include -I${SDK}/usr/include" \
LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/.local/lib" \
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local --disable-utf8proc
make -j4
make install

CFLAGS — tells gcc where to find libevent headers + macOS SDK ncurses headers
LDFLAGS — tells linker where to find libevent .a files
--disable-utf8proc — tmux 3.7 requires explicit choice; we don’t need unicode proc support
The SDK path (xcrun --show-sdk-path) is the key to finding ncurses without brew

Step 4: PATH setup

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

Result:

~/.local/bin/tmux 3.7
~/.local/lib/libevent*.a (static, no runtime dependency)

Why this works without brew:

macOS ships ncurses headers inside the SDK at /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include/ncurses.h — you just have to point CFLAGS there
libevent is self-contained, builds in ~30s
tmux links statically against both, so no DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks needed

Cleanup: rm -rf ~/tmp-build — source tarballs no longer needed after install.

Back Donate