Environment variables in tmux options not honoured

[eulersson]

Environment

• OS: macOS 14.4.1
• Terminal: iTerm Build 3.5.0beta22
• Shell: zsh 5.9 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0) bash 3.2.57(1)-release
• tmux: 3.4

Problem

If I follow the instructions and set the @dark-notify-theme-path-light or dark equivalent as follows:

set -g @dark-notify-theme-path-light '$HOME/.config/tmux/plugins/tmux-colors-solarized/tmuxcolors-light.conf'
                                      ^^^^^

It won't work and won't be able to resolve the file because the $HOME variable won't be expanded:

The theme_path=$(eval echo "$theme_path") resolves to /$HOME/.config/... instead of /Users/ramon/.config/...:

tmux-dark-notify/scripts/tmux-theme-mode.sh

Line 48 in 4a205f8

theme_path=$(eval echo "$theme_path")

If I add some prints to your script and change the macOS's Dark/Light system preference:

Suggested Solution

If instead of using single quotes...

set -g @dark-notify-theme-path-light '$HOME/.config/tmux/plugins/tmux-colors-solarized/tmuxcolors-light.conf'

... I use double quotes...

set -g @dark-notify-theme-path-light "$HOME/.config/tmux/plugins/tmux-colors-solarized/tmuxcolors-light.conf"

... Then this issue does not happen anymore.

I suggest making explicit in the README about this issue (at least happening on macOS) or handling the case in the tmux-theme-mode.sh script of this project.

[erikw]

Strange, for me it does work to expand $HOME with single quote config. This is my working configuration on macOS:

https://github.com/erikw/dotfiles/blob/d68d6274d67ac47afa20b9a0b9f3b0fa54bcdaf3/.config/tmux/tmux.conf#L212

[eulersson]

Interesting... Well for now I will leave it with double quotes and leave it as a mystery. If any user experiences this and might help us see what causes this wrong variable expansion it would be great.

It would be nice to reproduce it in a clean macOS environment, but I don't have the time to spend and try it, so from my side if you want to close the issue I would be fine, with the double quotes it works.

[ivuorinen]

There's a shellcheck entry for this: https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2016

I've had problems with this issue too, so it might be worth checking. Do you have any extra options in your .bashrc or .zshrc (or similar) that could make single quotes expand vars?

[erikw]

I don't have access to my main computer system yet, however I kow I added code specifically for expanding environment variables to this project. See this comment for a link to the code:

#2 (comment)