Essential Commands

Short: new

Create a new session and attach the current terminal to it, unless -d is given. With -t, the new session joins a session group and shares its windows, while keeping its own current window.

Short: attach, a

Attach to an existing session. If no session is specified, attach to the most recently used session. If no sessions exist, an error is reported.

Short: detach

Detach the current client or the client specified by -t from its session. The session continues running in the background.

Destroy the given session, closing any windows linked to it and no other sessions, and detaching all clients attached to it.

Short: ls

List all sessions. Each session is shown with its name, number of windows, size, and whether it is attached.

Short: rename

Rename the session specified by -t, or the current session if -t is not given.

Short: switchc

Switch the current client to a different session.

Short: neww

Create a new window. If -t is given, the new window is created at the specified index. If a shell-command is given, it is executed in the new window.

Short: selectw

Select a window. The window becomes the current window in its session.

Short: renamew

Rename the current window, or the window specified by -t.

Short: killw

Kill the current window or the window specified by -t, and all panes within it.

Short: lsw

List windows in a session. With -a, list all windows in all sessions.

Open an interactive tree of sessions, windows, and panes to preview and choose one. This is the picker behind the default Prefix + s (sessions) and Prefix + w (windows) bindings.

Short: swapw

Swap two windows so they exchange positions. With -d the active window is not changed to follow the move.

Short: movew

Move a window to a new index, optionally in another session. With -r, renumber all windows in the session to remove gaps in the indexes.

Short: respawnw

Reuse a window to run a command, restarting it in place. Useful for windows whose command exited when remain-on-exit is on.

Short: splitw

Create a new pane by splitting the current pane. The -h flag splits horizontally (creates panes side by side), and -v splits vertically (creates panes above/below).

Short: newp

Create a floating pane — a pane that sits above the tiled layout like a popup, but is not modal and behaves like a regular pane (same escape sequence support, appears in pane lists). Added in tmux 3.7 and bound to Prefix + * by default.

Short: selectp

Select a pane. Various flags allow selecting panes by direction or marking them.

Short: resizep

Resize a pane, either by a specified amount or to an absolute size.

Short: killp

Destroy the current pane or the pane specified by -t.

Short: swapp

Swap two panes. If -U is given, swap with the previous pane; if -D, swap with the next pane.

Short: respawnp

Reuse a pane to run a command, restarting it in place without changing the layout. Handy for re-running a dead or crashed pane.

Enter copy mode. In copy mode, you can scroll through history, search, and copy text. The mode-keys option controls whether vi or emacs keybindings are used.

Short: pasteb

Insert the contents of a paste buffer into the specified pane.

Short: capturep

Capture the contents of a pane into a paste buffer, or print them to stdout with -p. Useful for scripting, logging, or saving scrollback to a file.

Short: clearhist

Remove and free the scrollback history for a pane. Reclaims memory used by long-running panes with large buffers.

Short: source

Execute commands from a file. This is typically used to reload the tmux configuration.

Short: display

Display a message in the status line. If no message is given, display information about the current pane.

Short: set

Set a session, window, or server option. Without -g, the option is set for the current session.

Short: send

Send keys to a pane. This is useful for scripting tmux to automate commands.

Short: lsk

List all key bindings. Shows the key tables (prefix, root, copy-mode, etc.) and their bindings.

Short: bind

Bind a key to a command. The key is bound in the prefix table by default.

Short: popup

Open a temporary popup terminal floating above the current client, running a command (a shell by default). Great for quick tools without disturbing your layout.

Short: menu

Display an interactive menu at the given position. Each item has a display name, a shortcut key, and a tmux command to run when chosen.

Short: pipep

Pipe a pane's output to a shell command for live logging. With no command, any existing pipe is stopped.

Set (or unset) a hook that runs a tmux command automatically when an event occurs, such as a session being created or a window being linked. Flags mirror set-option.

Short: if

Run the first command if shell-command succeeds, otherwise the optional second command. With -F, no shell runs and the condition is a format that is true unless empty or zero.

Short: run

Run a shell command (or, with -C, a tmux command) without opening a window. Any output is shown in view mode in the pane once the command finishes. Used heavily by plugins.

Manage the access-control list for the tmux socket, so other users can attach read-only or read-write. The server's owner and root always have access. File-system permissions on the socket must still be set manually.

Kill the tmux server and all clients and sessions. This is a complete shutdown of tmux.