Not sure what bash is doing but tested with ksh and it runs and picks up changes in both .profile(login shells) and .kshrc(all shells) so I don't think it is tm

Not sure what bash is doing but tested with ksh and it runs and picks up changes in both .profile(login shells) and .kshrc(all shells) so I don't think it is tmux that is interfering with that aspect. In fact I was a bit surprised that .profile ran on every created pane, as naively I would not have thought that would be a login shell. not sure about the rest, I did read the man page again, and wow there is a lot more configurabilty than I first thought, however I found nothing great, the best I could come up with is. bind c 'source-file /home/xxx/.tmux.conf; new-window'