No more restarting tmux to apply changed configurations. Just put source-file /path/to/tmux-reset at the top of your .tmux.conf.

tmux-reset is very similar to reset.css or normalize.css. It unsets tmux options to their defaults and unbinds all of the bound keys, and then applies the default key bindings. After that, you are free to change options you'd like to.

1. Download tmux-reset file and put it in somewhere(for example, ~/.tmux/reset). You can rename it to whatever you want. Even the file extension isn't important.

2. Open your .tmux.conf and put the following line at the top:

   source-file ~/.tmux/reset

   Don't forget to change ~/.tmux/reset to the location you put the tmux-reset.

3. That's it. Now whenever you reload your configuration(.tmux.conf), you don't need to kill your tmux server and restart the server to reset the other options to the default.

Here is a shorthand for the manual installation above:

curl -Lo ~/.tmux/reset --create-dirs \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hallazzang/tmux-reset/master/tmux-reset

Actually, it doesn't do any 'installation' stuffs. It just downloads the file into ~/.tmux/reset. You still have to put source-file ~/.tmux/reset at the top of your .tmux.conf.