How to rename a pane in tmux

Here are the relevant settings:

pane-active-border-bg colour

pane-active-border-fg colour
    Set the pane border colour for the currently active pane.

So, try adding something like this to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set-option -g pane-active-border-fg blue

That will set a blue border around the active pane. The pane-active-border-bg option can be used for a more visible solution, as well.

You can write a small shell script that launches tmux with the required programs. I have the following in a shell script that I call dev-tmux. A dev environment:

#!/bin/sh
tmux new-session -d 'vim'
tmux split-window -v 'ipython'
tmux split-window -h
tmux new-window 'mutt'
tmux -2 attach-session -d

So everytime I want to launch my favorite dev environment I can just do

$ dev-tmux