Hi @Arkham ,

have you seen this page yet? https://github.com/direnv/direnv/wiki/Tmux

I don't know if adding an exception is a good idea or not. I would like to avoid adding specialized exceptions like that in direnv but if it solves the problem then maybe. Tmux seems to be changing a bunch of environment variables on start which is tricky to deal with from direnv's perspective. I think the issue is really with Tmux but last time I tried digging in the code I got lost.

Have a look at the wiki page to see if it can solve your problem. If you get a better understanding of Tmux than I do I am open to add that exception.

Hey @zimbatm, thanks for getting back to me. Yup, I've seen that page and it was very useful to get tmux to work: the specific issue that I ran into was that tmux uses a special environment variable to track which is the current active pane ($TMUX_PANE) and direnv was interfering with that environment variable because I had ran direnv reload inside a tmux pane.

But in more general terms, I think that there are use cases when the user might want to ignore specific environment variables. By looking at the source of env_diff we already have escape hatches for fish and bash; recently a colleague of mine asked me if there is a way to tell direnv to completely ignore SSH_AUTH_SOCK so it made me think that there are more cases out there of people needing escape hatches for direnv.

I would be open to have that configurable in the config.toml file. Something like [env] ignore_keys = ["TMUX_PANE", "SSH_AUTH_SOCK"]. It would require a bit of change in the code to pass the configuration object around.

@Arkham See also restrict direnv load on how you can ignore environment variables with the current direnv implementation.

Another example of needing an escape hatch:

I use zsh as my interactive shell, but prefer bash scripts for portability. I configure $PS4 separately for zsh and bash, but every direnv load ends up overriding my zsh PS4 with my bash PS4.