I use tmux splits (panes). Inside one of these panes there's a Vim process, and it has its own splits (windows).
In Vim I have key bindings C-h/j/k/l
set to switch windows in the given direction. (Vim default mappings for windows switching are the same, but prefixed with C-W
.) I'd like to use the same keystrokes for switching tmux panes.
An extra goal that I've solved with a dirty hack is to toggle between last active panes with C-\
.
Here's how it should work:
- If I'm in "vim window 2", going in left (
C-h
) or down (C-j
) direction should switch windows inside vim. - However, if I'm in "vim window 3", going right (
C-l
) or down (C-j
) should select the next tmux pane in that direction.
The solution has 3 parts:
- In
~/.tmux.conf
, I bind the keys I want to execute a customtmux-vim-select-pane
command; tmux-vim-select-pane
checks if the foreground process in the current tmux pane is Vim, then forwards the original keystroke to the vim process. Otherwise it simply switches tmux panes.- In Vim, I set bindings for the same keystrokes to a custom function. The function tries to switch windows in the given direction. If the window didn't change, that means there are no more windows in the given direction inside vim, and it forwards the pane switching command to tmux by shelling out to
tmux select-pane
.
-
check
tmux -V
that you have v1.8 -
get the vim-tmux-navigator plugin
-
additional
~/.tmux.conf
config &tmux-vim-select-pane
script:curl -fsSL https://gist.github.com/mislav/5189704/raw/install.sh | bash -e
@mislav, thanks a ton for this. I just set it up and vastly prefer moving around with it.
I did run into two issues while setting it up that I wanted to document here in case anyone else hits them:
tmux-vim-select-pane
uses a format command added to tmux sometime between 1.7 & 1.8. In order to get this running I had to upgrade my tmux to version 1.8. Very straightforward withbrew upgrade tmux
.if [ $cmd = "vim" ]; then
and all works as expected.In addition, I extracted the vim plugin into a standalone repo for use with Vundle, Pathogen, etc. I prefer using Vundle for easy install / uninstall and thought I would share in case anyone else wanted to go that route as well. The standalone plugin repo can be found here.
Thanks again!