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I would like my default bash shell to go straight into tmux instead of my always having to type tmux every time.

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This seems to work...

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tmux#Start_tmux_on_every_shell_login

Simply add the following line of bash code to your .bashrc before your aliases; the code for other shells is very similar:

[[ $TERM != "screen" ]] && exec tmux
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Please don't post answers that are just links to other pages; at least summarize what it says – Michael Mrozek♦ Jul 20 '12 at 17:32
For me this also required [[ $- != *i* ]] && return to not being an infinite loop (from the same page) – Keith Smiley Apr 14 at 1:45
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There is command chsh which changes login shell. Consult man chsh.

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tmux is not a shell, it's a terminal multiplexer like GNU screen. Interestingly, it does support the -c option according to the man page, so it may work like a shell just enough to use it as your login shell, but I suspect it won't work properly in all situations, e.g. graphical logins via gdm/kdm. – Mikel Jul 20 '12 at 15:32
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As Mikel already stated in his comment to have tmux as your login shell can have side effects. But you can make tmux your default shell, literally. A user's default shell is defined in /etc/passwd. So you can become root and edit /etc/passwd, e.g. sudo vi /etc/passwd search for the line that begins with your username. It probably ends with :/bin/bash. Change /bin/bash to /usr/bin/tmux and now tmux is your default login shell.

However, no guarantee that this won't cause problems!

What may work better is to NOT do anything that requries root privileges. I would try to create a file in my home directoy named .bash_login and start tmux from within that file: `echo "tmux" >~/.bash_login.

This should work, but you have to try and find our yourself, b/c the bash documentation is not very exact about what file is read and executed when.

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What your first paragraph describes is what chsh does! Except that your way requires being root and is error-prone. Running tmux from .bash_login is more likely to break remote logins. – Gilles Jul 20 '12 at 23:10

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