If you have made changes to your tmux configuration file in the ~/.tmux.conf file, it shouldn’t be necessary to start the server up again from scratch with kill-server. Instead, you can prompt the current tmux session to reload the configuration with the source-file command.

This can be done either from within tmux, by pressing Ctrl+B and then : to bring up a command prompt, and typing:

:source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Or simply from a shell:

$ tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

This should apply your changes to the running tmux server without affecting the sessions or windows within them.