This cheat sheet provides a quick overview of tmux commands, enabling you to manage terminal sessions effectively and boost your productivity. tmux, short for terminal multiplexer, is a valuable tool for running and managing multiple terminal sessions within a single terminal window or remote shell. This guide covers session management, window management, pane management, and other miscellaneous commands to aid in effective tmux utilization.
A tmux session is an independent workspace that houses one or multiple windows. Users or shell scripts create sessions, and each session maintains its state independently. They are useful for organizing terminal activities, especially in remote shell scenarios where a dropped connection can disrupt your work. In such a case, tmux sessions remain alive, and you can reattach to them later.
| Action | Command |
|---|---|
| Start new session | tmux |
| Start new named session | tmux new -s myname |
| Attach to last session | tmux a or tmux attach |
| Attach to named session | tmux a -t myname |
| List all sessions | tmux ls |
| Detach from session | tmux detach or Ctrl-b d |
| Kill session | tmux kill-session -t myname |
In tmux, a window functions similarly to a tab in traditional GUI-based terminals. It's essentially a full-size container that can house one or more panes (think of split views within a tab). tmux provides various commands to manage these windows, such as creating new ones, navigating between them, killing them, or renaming them.
| Action | Command |
|---|---|
| Create window | Ctrl-b c |
| Go to window | Ctrl-b n (next), Ctrl-b p (previous), Ctrl-b l (last), Ctrl-b 0..9 (window by number) |
| Kill window | Ctrl-b & |
| Rename window | Ctrl-b , |
| List all windows | Ctrl-b l |
A pane in tmux is a sub-window that resides within a window. You can split your tmux windows into multiple panes and have multiple shell sessions within the same window. This feature can be especially useful for monitoring multiple streams of output, editing files side by side, or other tasks that benefit from a segmented display.
| Action | Command |
|---|---|
| Split pane horizontally | Ctrl-b % |
| Split pane vertically | Ctrl-b " |
| Move to another pane | Ctrl-b Arrow key |
| Close pane | Ctrl-b x |
| Swap panes | Ctrl-b o |
| Show pane numbers | Ctrl-b q |
Aside from session, window, and pane management, tmux also offers a plethora of additional commands and features. For instance, you can view all the available commands, scroll through the history, or even set options for all sessions. This section provides some of these miscellaneous, but highly useful commands.
| Action | Command |
|---|---|
| See all commands | Ctrl-b ? |
| Scroll through history | Ctrl-b [ then use arrow keys to scroll and q to quit |
| Set option for all sessions | tmux set -g option value |
This cheat sheet provides a concise overview of the most commonly used tmux commands. However, tmux has many more features and commands. For a more comprehensive exploration, you can refer to the tmux man page by typing man tmux in your terminal.