tmux Cheat Sheet: Keys and Commands

A reference, not a tutorial. If you want the mental model — what a session actually is, why the prefix exists, and a config worth stealing — read the tmux tutorial first and come back here when you need the keys.

Everything below is a tmux 3.5 default, checked against a server started with no config at all. If a key does something else on your machine, your ~/.tmux.conf is the prime suspect, and prefix then ? will tell you what it did.

How to read this

prefix means Ctrl+B, pressed and released, then the key in the table. It is not a chord. Ctrl+B c is two separate motions, which is why tmux feels slow for a fortnight and then doesn’t.

Keys marked repeatable can be pressed again on their own within about half a second, so prefix Ctrl+Left Ctrl+Left Ctrl+Left shrinks a pane three columns without three prefixes.

The ten worth learning first

Learn these and you can stop reading. The rest is for the day you need it.

Keys	Effect
prefix d	Detach — leave everything running
prefix c	New window
prefix 1–9	Jump to window by number
prefix %	Split left/right
prefix "	Split top/bottom
prefix arrow	Move between panes
prefix z	Zoom this pane full-window, and back
prefix [	Copy mode — scroll the scrollback
prefix w	Interactive picker of every session and window
prefix ?	List every binding, including the ones you rebound

Sessions, from the shell

The commands you type before tmux is running, or from a pane when you fancy being literal.

Command	Effect
tmux	Start an unnamed session
tmux new -s work	Start a session called work
tmux new -s work -n editor	…with its first window named editor
tmux ls	List sessions
tmux attach -t work	Attach to work (tmux a -t work in practice)
tmux attach -d -t work	Attach, detaching whoever else is looking
tmux new -A -s work	Attach if it exists, create it if it doesn’t
tmux kill-session -t work	End that session
tmux kill-server	End all of them, and the server
tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf	Reload the config into a running server

tmux new -A -s work is the one to put in a shell alias or an SSH command: it is the same keystroke whether or not the session is already there, which means no more tmux ls, squint, tmux attach dance on a box you visit twice a month. Pair it with a host entry in ~/.ssh/config and reconnecting to a long job is one word.

Sessions, from inside

Keys	Effect
prefix d	Detach
prefix $	Rename the current session
prefix s	Tree of sessions and windows, navigable
prefix ( / )	Previous / next session
prefix L	Back to the last session you were in
prefix D	Choose which client to detach
prefix Ctrl+Z	Suspend the tmux client itself (fg to return)

Windows

Windows are tabs. They fill the whole terminal and hold panes.

Keys	Effect
prefix c	New window
prefix ,	Rename this window
prefix &	Kill this window (asks first)
prefix n / p	Next / previous window
prefix 0–9	Jump straight to that number
prefix '	Prompt for a window index — for when you have more than nine
prefix l	Back to the last window
prefix w	Pick from a tree of everything
prefix f	Search windows by the text on screen
prefix .	Renumber this window
prefix < / >	Menu of window / pane actions

prefix f is badly underused: it searches the visible content of every window, so “which window was the failing test in” is a question you can answer rather than hunt.

Panes

Keys	Effect
prefix %	Split left and right
prefix "	Split top and bottom
prefix arrow	Move to the pane in that direction
prefix o	Cycle to the next pane
prefix ;	Back to the last pane
prefix q	Flash pane numbers; press one to jump there
prefix z	Zoom / unzoom
prefix x	Kill this pane (asks first)
prefix !	Break this pane out into its own window
prefix Space	Cycle through the built-in layouts
prefix Ctrl+O	Rotate the panes through the layout
prefix { / }	Swap this pane with the previous / next one
prefix m	Mark this pane (for join-pane and friends)

Tip

% splits left-and-right and " splits top-and-bottom, and nobody has ever got that right first time. The mnemonic that works: % has a slash leaning between two blobs, " has two marks stacked. The mnemonic that works better is rebinding them to | and -, which the starter config does.

Resizing

Keys	Effect
prefix Ctrl+arrow	Resize by one cell — repeatable
prefix Alt+arrow	Resize by five cells — repeatable
prefix Alt+1 … Alt+5	even-horizontal, even-vertical, main-horizontal, main-vertical, tiled
prefix E	Spread the panes out evenly again

prefix Alt+5 (tiled) is the “I have made a mess of this” key. prefix E is the gentler version that keeps your layout and just evens the sizes.

Copy mode

prefix [ enters copy mode; q leaves it. This is also how you scroll: tmux owns the scrollback, so your terminal’s own scrollbar is looking at the wrong thing.

The default bindings are Emacs-style, matching the readline keys your shell already uses:

Keys	Effect
Ctrl+Space	Start selecting
Alt+W	Copy the selection and leave
Ctrl+G	Clear the selection
Ctrl+S / Ctrl+R	Incremental search down / up
n / N	Next / previous match
Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E	Start / end of line
Alt+B / Alt+F	Back / forward a word
Alt+< / Alt+>	Top / bottom of the history
g	Go to line number
Ctrl+V / Alt+V	Page down / up
R	Toggle rectangle (column) selection
q or Escape	Leave copy mode

Then prefix ] pastes the buffer back, prefix # lists every buffer you have accumulated, and prefix = lets you pick one.

If you set mode-keys vi

setw -g mode-keys vi swaps the lot for Vim motions — h j k l, w b, / and ? to search, G and g for the ends. Two defaults surprise almost everyone:

Keys	What it actually does
Space	Start selecting — not v
v	Toggle rectangle selection
Enter	Copy and leave — not y

So the v / y muscle memory every Vim user arrives with is wrong in both halves. The customary fix, and it is customary for a reason:

~/.tmux.conf

setw -g mode-keys vi
bind -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-selection-and-cancel
bind -T copy-mode-vi C-v send-keys -X rectangle-toggle

The command prompt

prefix : opens tmux’s own command line, which is where anything without a key binding lives. Everything in ~/.tmux.conf is a command, so anything you can configure you can also type once to try it.

Command	Effect
:new-window -n logs	New window, named up front
:rename-session api	Rename without the prompt
:swap-window -t 1	Move this window to position 1
:join-pane -t :2	Pull this pane into window 2
:break-pane	The reverse: pane becomes its own window
:setw synchronize-panes on	Type once, into every pane at once
:set mouse on	Mouse scrolling and pane selection, right now
:list-keys -T copy-mode-vi	What a key table actually contains
:show-options -g	Every global option and its current value
:source-file ~/.tmux.conf	Reload the config

Caution

synchronize-panes broadcasts every keystroke to every pane in the window, which is either the fastest way to update six servers or the fastest way to break six servers. Turn it off the moment you’re done: :setw synchronize-panes off.

Finding a key you’ve forgotten

Keys	Effect
prefix ?	Every binding, with descriptions, searchable
prefix /	Press a key; tmux says what it is bound to
prefix i	Show the current window’s status message
prefix ~	The server’s message log, for when something silently didn’t happen
prefix C	Interactive options browser (tmux 3.2 and later)

prefix ? is the honest answer to this entire page. The difference is that it lists your bindings, including the ones you rebound and forgot about, which is a different and often more useful question than what tmux ships with.

Config lines worth knowing

Not a config — the tutorial has one of those. These are the specific lines people come looking for:

# Prefix on Ctrl+A instead, the traditional swap
set -g prefix C-a
unbind C-b
bind C-a send-prefix

# Start counting at 1, and close the gaps when a window dies
set -g base-index 1
setw -g pane-base-index 1
set -g renumber-windows on

# Scrollback worth having
set -g history-limit 50000

# Mouse: scroll, click panes, drag borders
set -g mouse on

# Don't make Vim wait to find out whether Escape was a meta key
set -sg escape-time 10

# Reload without leaving
bind r source-file ~/.tmux.conf \; display "Config reloaded"

Moving the prefix to Ctrl+A costs you readline’s jump-to-start-of-line inside tmux — press the prefix twice to send a real Ctrl+A through. Whether that trade is worth it depends mostly on where your keyboard puts Ctrl, and some of them put it somewhere far better than others.

Keeping it

A cheat sheet you have to look up is a cheat sheet you will stop looking up. Once your ~/.tmux.conf has the half-dozen lines you actually want, put it in a git repository with the rest of your dotfiles so the next machine starts where this one left off.

If all of this still feels like a lot to memorise, that is a fair complaint and the reason Zellij exists — it puts the keys on screen instead of on a page like this one. It also, for now, loses on the thing that matters most, which the comparison covers.

And if you are reaching for tmux only because your terminal has no tabs, check whether it does — several in the roundup handle splits natively, and kitty will do layouts without a multiplexer at all. tmux earns its place on the far end of an SSH connection; locally it is a choice rather than a necessity.