My personal tmux cheatsheet 2020-11-07

Every now and then I am using tmux on my remote servers to manage my session. Because I notoriously forget all the finnicky key combinations, I wrote down the (for me) most important ones.

All key combinations start with Ctrl-b, which is indicated by the ^b shortcut in the tables below.

Sessions

cmd	Function
tmux	Start a new tmux session
tmux ls	Lists running sessions
tmux a	Connects to the first existing session
tmux a -t x	Connects to the session named/with id x

Panes (aka split views)

Keys	Function
^b%	Splits the actual pane horizontally
^b"	Splits the actual pane vertically
^bq	Show pane numbers
^b→↓←↑	go to the pane to the right/down/left/up
^bo	go to the next pane (cycle)
^bx	kill current pane

Windows

Keys	Function
^bw	List windows
^bc	Create new window
^b0 ...	go to Window 0 …
^bp	go to the previous window
^bn	go to the next window
^b,	Rename current window
^b&	Kill current window

Scolling, Copying

Keys	Function
^b:set-window-option mode-keys vi	Set window key mode to vi, which is what I REALLY want
^b:set -g mouse on	enable mouse scroll mode
^b[	Enter copy/scroll mode
in copymode:
^u	half page up (like in `vi)
^d	half page down (like in `vi)
shift-j	one line down
shift-k	one line up
/	search forward
?	search backward
q	exit copy/scroll mode
Select, copy text:
<space>	start text mark mode
(use vim movements to select)<enter>	mark and copy text
back in normal mode:
^b]	paste text

Enable mouse scrolling

# in ~/.tmux.conf:
set -g mouse on

within tmux:

^b:set -g mouse on

Exit

Keys	Function
^bd	Detach from tmux session (keeps session alive)