DEV Community

Pitayan Blog profile image Yanze Dai
Yanze Dai for Pitayan Blog

Posted on • Originally published at pitayan.com on

Learning tmux as a beginner

#shell #tools

Originally published on Pitayan | Learning tmux as a beginner

Nowadays, Tmux has become into the everyday tool in my workdays. I always wanted to summarize the Tmux usage from long ago when I began to use it. So this article is pretty much what I have started with as a Tmux beginner.

#Table of Contents

#What consists of Tmux?

  • Session
  • Window
  • Pane

#What is a Tmux session?

The "dialog" that's been kept by Tmux for running tasks which can be resumed later disconnection.

#1. Create a session

Creating a session in Tmux is very semantic:

$ tmux new -s <session_name>

# e.g.
$ tmux new -s helloworld
$ tmux new -s great
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#2. Kill a session

The -t flag here means "target". Put the target session name after it to delete the session from Tmux

$ tmux kill-session -t <session_name>

# e.g.
$ tmux kill-session -t helloworld
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#3. Kill all of the sessions

The command kill-server seems a bit confusing. But Tmux does have a server running behind the scenes to be able to keep the located processes when the session is detached. So, killing a Tmux server means deleting all saved sessions.

$ tmux kill-server
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#4. Switch between sessions

It's useful when we are in a particular session but want to transfer to another session we used.

$ tmux switch -t <session_name>

# e.g.
$ tmux switch -t great
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#5. Rename session

Edit the session name after we created it.

$ tmux switch -t <from> <to>

# e.g.
$ tmux rename -t great hi
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#What is a Tmux Window?

The "child" under a Tmux Session. A session can have multiple windows ("children") to switch from.

To manipulate the window, we need to use the "Prefix" shortcuts. By default, Tmux uses Ctrl+b.

#1. Create a new window

This will create a new window and leave a number of the window we created to the Tmux bottom status line.

Ctrl + b + c
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

0:zsh is the first window, 1:zsh is the second window.

#2. Switch between windows

We could choose the target window by specifying its number.

Ctrl + b + <window_number>

# e.g.
Ctrl + b + 2
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#3. Search the windows

We could look for the windows we created. The Tmux will go search the output / printout in the terminal.

Ctrl + b + f
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#4. List all of the windows in this session

The result screen is actually the same to search but with all of the windows we have.

Ctrl + b + w
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#5. Rename current window

By default, the window we created with Ctrl+b+c will have a name like "0:zsh" "1:shell". Sometimes we need special names to distinguish those windows (like naming the sessions) in a rather semantic way.

Ctrl + b + ,
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#6. Close current window 

Ctrl + b + &
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#What is a Tmux Pane?

Instead of Tmux windows to switch back and forth, a Tmux pane can help split the window into certain smaller blocks within the same screen. So that we could retain the information on the same screen.

#1. Split pane vertically / horizontally

Tmux makes it very easy to understand about pane splitting. The symbol % and " vividly explains how we are gonna split our screen.

# vertical split
Ctrl + b + "

# horizontal split
Ctrl + b + %
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#2. Kill a pane

Usually when we run nothing in the terminal, we could close it immediately with Ctrl+d for most of the terminals. However if we are under some program like Vim or SSH and still hope to kill the pane forcefully, this will come into help.

Ctrl + b + x
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#3. Switch between panes

Jump around the panes.

Ctrl + b + o
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

We also have numbers for each panes. Display the number of each pane and type the number to select the target pane.

# display pane number
Ctrl + b + q

# e.g.
Ctrl + b + q & 1
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#4. Move the current pane to a new window

Sometimes the pane we created is maybe too small to showcase everything in that terminal. We might need to consider moving the pane to a new window.

Ctrl + b + !
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

#Summary

I personally think Tmux is a very good looking and helpful tool to allow everyone to control their terminals with only keyboards. Nowadays terminal apps like "iTerm" "cmder" all provided features similar to Tmux's "window" and "pane". Sometimes, these features are even more convenient than Tmux.

Tmux is really a powerful tool. But it needs time for us to digest the shortcut keys which is seemingly a "learning" curve to us all so that we could finally master using this powerful tool.

Top comments (0)

Read next

maxshash profile image

How to Make a Status Page: Step-by-Step Guide

Max Shash -

jaiminbariya profile image

Understanding Quorum-Based Approaches in Distributed Systems - Jaimin Bariya

Jaimin Bariya -

greedykomdodragon profile image

Introducing Kontroler: A Kubernetes Scheduling Engine for DAGs

Jake C -

signadot profile image

The Struggle To Test Microservices Before Merging

Signadot -