tmux, like other great software, is deceptive. On the one hand, it's fairly easy
to get set up and start using right away. On the other hand, it's difficult to
take advantage of tmux's adanced features without spending some quality alone
time with the manual. But the problem with manuals
is that they aren't geared toward beginners. They are geared toward
helping seasoned developers and computer enthusiasts quickly obtain the
information they need so they can get back to real work. As a result, man pages
assume a certain level of a competence and experience and don't spend a lot of
time laying a conceptual framework for their software. And so while we agree
that "RTFM" (read the frickin' manual) is good advice, it's not the best advice
if the manual is written at a level that's inaccessible to you. So this guide
provides a gentler approach to learning the subtler, unwritten intricacies of
tmux that can't be easily gleaned by typing man tmux into the terminal. It
assumes the user is new to tmux and even fairly new to the world of command
line-based computing.
The only requirement for using this guide assumes is that you have tmux
installed and have figured out how to launch a tmux session from the shell with
tmux new -s <session_name> and that you have at least a day or two's worth
of experience getting around a command line. Though this guide will be
accessible to new users, many fairly experienced users can benefit from it, too.
The guide might start with an excessive amount of hand holding, but it
eventually goes into fairly good detail on many tmux features and configuration
options. So unless you have spent many hours reading the tmux manual, don't be
surprised if you pick up quite a few tips and tricks even if you've been using
tmux for years but never took the time to truly grok it.
So this guide's goals are two-fold: 1) help newbies get over the hump of confusion that often accompanies new software by giving them enough experience and a comfort level with tmux so that RTFM becomes possible and 2) give less experienced users and even some intermediate users a deeper understanding and appreciation for how to take advantage of tmux's many available customizations and features.
The split-window command was chosen for a "Super Guide" because it is,
arguably, the first command a beginning tmux user should be very familiar with.
Working with many applications simultaneously is the core feature of tmux and
the split-window command is the gateway command for taking advantage of it.
Using this command well requires the knowledge of many other configuration
settings and subcommands so by taking the time to explore this one command in
great detail, you will be much closer to being able to bend tmux to your will.
This guide assumes you are starting with a "clean" install of tmux and that
there is no .tmux.conf configuration file customizing your tmux set up or
adding plugins. To ensure the examples in this guide work and to minimize your
confusion, we strongly encourage you to rename your ~/.tmux.conf file and
store it safely somewhere on your hard drive. You can restore it when you finish
with the guide.
It's possible, though unlikely, there is a global tmux configuration file on your system that is customizing your tmux experience. Consult your operating system's documentation or friendly system administrator to ensure there isn't. If there is and you can't get rid of it, consider setting up a virtual machine or docker image you can call your own.
We'll begin our guide with a big picture overview of what the split-window
subcommand does.
When a new tmux session or window is created in tmux, only one application can
be seen inside of the visible window that tmux opens. split-window splits this
window up into rectangular-shaped subunits, called panes, as in a window
pane. If there is more than one pane in a tmux window, they are visually
delineated from one another with a thin, single pixel-wide border. Each pane can
have a different height and width so a tmux window with many panes can start to
resemble a window designed by the famous 20th century architect Frank
Lloyd Wright more than the neat, symmetrical arrangement found on a French door.
Panes have one of two states: "active" and "inactive." Active panes will have a brighter border color than the "inactive" ones. There can be only one active pane in a tmux session at a time, and that is the pane you are presently working in and that tmux will direct your keystrokes to. Inside each pane is a program, or process, if we are going to be more technically accurate. It could be a vim editing session, a shell prompt or any kind of application that can run in a terminal. You can have the same program running different processes in separate panes. For example, you might have five panes open, each with a different vim process running inside.
The advantage of being able to run multiple processes at the same time in different sections of your computer monitor is clear. The idea is not new and has been around for decades. If you have an operating system with a gui, you don't need tmux to pull this off. You could open a terminal window for each process you want to run and arrange them on your monitor the way you like. Or if the machine you want to run these processes on doesn't have a gui, you can ssh into them from a computer that does and achieve the same effect.
However, tmux is much more than a text-based gui. It has many great efficiency advantages it can offer over a modern gui environment by collecting all the processes together under a single tmux server that can talk to the pseudo-terminals containing the processes within each pane. And so if you take the time to become proficient with tmux, you will be duly rewarded.
The first step in that journey is to learn the split-window command well
because it is the key to unlocking the most important feature of tmux. The
split-window subcommand creates more panes so you can have more
applications visible at once. Of course, you only have so much screen real
estate and so there is a practical limitation for how many panes you can have
open in a single window. Working around that limitation is a topic for
another time. Our focus is on how to master this one single command to get
you off to a good start toward achieving mastery with tmux.
Before getting started, we should point out that one potentially confusing aspect
of the split-window command is its name is slightly misleading. If you split a
rock in half, you expect to get two rocks, right? But split-window doesn't
split a window into two windows. Instead, it splits the current active pane
of the current window into two panes. So it might be helpful to think of the
split-window command as the "split pane" command instead.
From the shell command line, you can issue hundreds or even thousands of
different commands. If you have tmux installed, tmux is one of those commands.
The tmux command itself has many commands nested within it. And so each of the
commands inside of tmux is properly referred to as a "subcommand" of the tmux
command.
There are a few different ways to execute the subcommands. You can access them with a couple of keystrokes inside a tmux window using what tmux calls key bindings. You can also type the subcommands in directly to the tmux command line. You can also place the subcommand inside a tmux configuration file. Finally, you can run them from a shell command line or script. Each of these ways is discussed next.
Note: This guide assumes you have not customized your key bindings. If you haven't already done so, make sure you have removed all tmux customizations as recommended in the "Important note on turning off tmux customizations" in the overview to this guide above.
There are two different types of tmux splits: vertical and horizontal. Each of these two splits has a key binding dedicated to it that can be executed by you. To execute the key binding for the vertical split, which splits the current pane of the current window into a top and bottom pane, you type in the following keys from inside an active terminal window running a tmux session:
C-b "
For those new to tmux, this means "hold down the control key while you tap the
b key, then release the control key, then hit the " key (shift-')." So
C-b is read as "Control-b." The " character is the double quotation mark.
After typing these keys, you will see a thin line appear across the middle of your window (if you're not seeing this behavior, seriously consider rereading the "Important note on turning off tmux customizations" in the intro to this guide above; this is your final warning). Everything above the line is the original pane and everything below the line is the new pane. Although a horizontal line appears across your screen, tmux considers this to be a "vertical" split because the new pane is aligned vertically with the old pane. This often confuses seasoned vim users where a "horizontal" split looks like tmux's vertical split. You'll frequently see tmux's vertical split referred to as horizontal splits in poorly researched blog posts across the web.
At any rate, The C-b " keystroke combination is one of the many default key
bindings that tmux provides for you out of the box. Key bindings are similar to
"hot keys" or "shortcut keys" you may be familiar with in other applications
(e.g., control-s for "save document"). Key bindings are great for issuing
frequently used commands very quickly. In tmux, key bindings are a bit more
flexible and powerful than typical hot keys. We will learn more about them in
more detail later in the guide.
For now, you should know that in the key binding above, tmux refers to the
C-b keystroke combination as the prefix key. When you hit C-b, tmux
hijacks your keyboard input from all the other applications and waits patiently
for you to enter the next key to see what tmux command you want to perform. In
this way, specific tmux commands are bound to certain keys and keystroke
combinations, hence the phrase "key binding." The key combination bound to our
split command in this case is C-b ". tmux refers to the key after the prefix
key as the key command. In this case the key command is the " character
which, by default, is associated with the split-window command.
The prefix key prevents they key commands from activating while you work on the
applications running inside the panes. For example, if you want to type the "
character into a text document, it would be annoying if tmux started splitting
panes on you. The C-b prefix is a magic keystroke that wakes tmux up and gets
it ready to listen for your next keystroke. C-b tells tmux, "Listen up! I
want to give you a command," much like the talking speakers on your kitchen
counter. You wouldn't like it if those devices piped up during dinner
conversation with your friends and family. That's why you're required to
"prefix" your commands with some attention-grabbing statement like "Hey
Siri!" or "Alexa." tmux works the same way. It's there listening for the
special prefix command but it shuts up and stays out of the way until it gets
it.
Key bindings can be customized to your liking. You will learn how to do this
later. For now, the only other useful thing to know about key bindings is that
if you hit C-b and and then want to back out of giving a key command, you can
hit Esc (the escape key). This will get tmux back out of the way
so you can continue interacting with the application you have open in
your active pane.
A different key binding is used to perform a horizontal split. In tmux, horizontal splits place the new pane on the right side of the current active pane. The key binding for a horizontal split is:
C-b %
Though the key bindings can be a bit confusing to use a first, you will quickly adapt to them and use them reflexively without even thinking.
To help you remember the default key bindings for splitting, think of the punctuation marks used in these two bindings as visually resembling the types of splits they perform. The double quotation mark used for vertical splits are vertical lines that you can imagine as connecting a top and bottom pane. The percent sign has a circle on the left and right split with a line between them, which looks kind of like a horizontal split. Many people still find this confusing and one of the first custom key binding changes they make is to the default key bindings for splitting panes. Again, we will show you how to do that later in the guide.
The two default key bindings for splitting windows only do very basic splits.
It's possible to modify the existing key bindings and add new key bindings to do
fancier kinds of splits which we'll show you how to do later in the guide. But
if you don't have a key binding that does exactly what you need, then you will
need to type the split-window command in manually. To run the default command,
we type in the following keystrokes:
C-b :split-window
Let's break this down in detail. Here we see the prefix key again, C-b,
followed by a colon, followed by the actual command, split-window. The command
above does not supply any options or a shell command that may be passed to the
split-window subcommand. We will cover that later.
For now, the really important part to understand is the special role the colon
plays in the command above. Typing in the : character after our prefix, C-b,
is a key binding that places us into tmux's command line mode. When we enter
command line mode, the tmux command prompt appears and our cursor is placed
inside of it. Now we can start typing the split-window command and tell tmux
exactly how we want our split to be executed using options and arguments we
might supply. C-b : essentially tells tmux "Hey, I want to type in a command,
so give me the command prompt." Like with C-b, you can back out of the command
prompt by hitting the Esc key.
We should point out that the tmux command line is not the same as a shell
command line. tmux expects to see tmux subcommands here, not shell commands. If
you do need to run a shell command from within tmux, you can use the
appropriately named run-shell command which is not covered in this guide.
The split-window command, along with other subcommands, can also be placed
inside of a tmux configuration file. These configuration files can run every
time you start tmux. You can also run them manually while inside tmux. You can
use configuration files to help you automate your window splits and get them set
up just the way you like when a new tmux session is launched. All this will be
covered later in the guide.
The split-window can also be directly run right from a shell command line:
tmux split-window
Note that this way of executing split-window is the same as executing it from
tmux's command prompt except we precede the subcommand with the tmux shell
command. Our shell has no knowledge of what split-window is, so we have to
type tmux first so it knows to pass the subcommand along to tmux which will
know how to respond. The other difference is that there is no need to type
a colon, of course, because we aren't trying to get to the tmux command prompt,
we are passing the subcommand directly to tmux via the shell. If we do put a
colon there, tmux will think the colon is part of an unreognized command and
throw an error.
Running the split-window subcommand works even if it is executed from outside
of a tmux session. That's because the command ultimately gets passed to the tmux
server running on our machine which processes it and takes the appropriate
action. As a result, we can run tmux commands from inside shell scripts and
functions, and perform all kinds advanced automation tricks that can make
working with tmux a real joy. Unfortunately, this is not a guide on shell
scripting and that will be left to the reader to explore.
Now that we know all the different ways to execute the split command, let's take a closer look at what it actually does and then later, how we can change its default behavior.
It's time to explore what split-window does out of the box, without passing it
any options. Start a new tmux session with tmux new -s split and then
issue this simple split-window command:
C-b :split-window
This default command does quite a bit of work. It:
- Splits the currently active pane and opens a new pane
- Places the new pane below the existing active pane (a vertical split).
- Sizes the new pane to be exactly half the height of the current pane
- Launches the default shell in the new pane
- Deactivates the old pane and makes the new pane active. As a result, your cursor is now at the command line prompt of the shell the opens up inside the new pane.
As already mentioned, you can use the C-b " key binding to do this same
action. Go ahead and practice issuing this key binding enough times so that the
action becomes instinctual. If you start running out of space in your window,
practice using the C-b :kill-pane -a command to close all the open panes
except the active one. Or, if you want to kill just the pane you are currently
in, do C-b x and answer "y" when asked if you are sure you want to kill
the pane.
As you create new panes, you'll notice each pane you created gets progressively smaller. The first new pane you create is half the size of the window. The second pane created is half the size of the first pane. The third pane is half the size of the second, and so on, until we run out of room and can't create any more panes. Don't worry about resizing the panes or moving between panes. We will cover all that later.
The next several sections of this guide will show you how to override tmux's
default settings by using the split-window options to get it to respond
with in more precise and desired behaviors.
When you get bored creating vertical splits and are ready to inject some excitement into your life, create a horizontal split with the following command:
C-b :split-window -h
This is the same command as the vertical split except we've added an h,
preceded with a -, after the subcommand. The dash tells split-window that we
are about to give it one or more options. In this case, the single "h" option we
pass to our command stands for "horizontal." So when we apply this option,
instead of the new pane showing up below the existing pane, it will show up to
the right of the existing pane. In other words, the h option overrode our
default vertical split with a horizontal split.
As we saw, this simple split can be performed with the C-b % key binding. Go
ahead and practice a little with this key binding.
We will learn more split-window options in a bit. First we will take a short
detour and talk about how to save a few keystrokes issuing the split window
command in tmux.
Typing sucks. It's painfully slow even if you're a fast typist. It would be much better if we could just think a thought and have the computer magically execute it. That day isn't coming any time soon so the next best thing is to make more efficient use of our keystrokes to make issuing commands much faster.
One way to do that is by using aliases. tmux provides an alias for
split-window called splitw. So instead of 12 keystrokes with split-window,
you only have to type in 6 keystrokes with splitw. It doesn't sound like much
but it adds up over time. And when you want to get something done fast, typing
in all those keys gets very annoying very fast.
From this point forward in the guide, we will use splitw instead of
split-window. So instead of C-b :split-window you will see C-b :splitw.
Aliases are nice but tab completion is even better. Hopefully, tab completion is already set up on your machine. You can find out by issuing the following keystrokes in tmux:
C-b :sp<TAB>
This is the prefix, followed by the colon, followed by sp, followed by the
"Tab" key. The tab key tells tmux to try to finish typing in the rest of the
command for us. We only have to type in just enough of the command so the
completion feature can figure out the full command we wish to issue. Otherwise,
it will complete as much of the command it can until we supply it with more
letters in the command and hit TAB again.
In this case, sp is enough for our completion feature to determine we want to
use the full split-window command because no other commands begin with "sp".
If you have tab completion on, you will see "sp" expand into split-window. So
now we have gone form 12 keystrokes to just three. Very nice.
Setting up command completion is not covered by this guide. You should consult with your local computer expert or search engine or man page for guidance.
OK, now that we are super efficient with our keystrokes, let's cover some more options.
By default, splitw opens a new pane that is half the height or width of the
pane that is split. tmux gives us two options to override this default
behavior. This saves us the effort of having to resize the new pane to our
liking after we create it.
With vertical splits, we can control how many lines high our new pane is with
the -l option. The "l" stands for "lines." Here is the option
in action:
C-b :splitw -l 20
The "20" is the size argument that is passed to our -l option. This creates
our default vertical split with a new pane that is 20 lines high. Note that if
you choose a number larger than the number of lines in the current pane, the
current pane will be reduce to just one line and the new pane will take up the
rest.
With a horizontal split, the -l option controls how many columns (or "cells",
as the official man pages refers to them) wide our new pane will be. So if we
want a horizontal split that is 20 columns wide, we do:
C-b :splitw -hl 20
Notice how we combined the -h option with the -l option using a single dash.
This should not be new to you if you have any experience issuing commands on the
command line. A reminder, however, that the -l option has to come last because
we are passing it an argument. Alternatively, we could separate out the options
like so:
C-b :splitw -l 20 -h
This way, we don't have to care what order the options are in since each option gets its own leading dash.
Sometimes it's more useful to give a percentage of how how or wide the new pane
should be relative to the current pane. We can use the -p option in this case.
The "p," as you already guessed, is for "percent." So, for example, if we have
pane that is 50 lines high and we issue this command:
C-b :splitw -p 10
Our new pane will be 5 lines high, or 10% of our original pane. The old pane
will take up 45 lines, or the remaining 90%. Simple enough. Just like the -l
option, the -p option can be used to tell tmux how wide to make the new pane
if we are creating a horizontal split.
For vertical splits, the default operation places our new pane below the current
pane. For horizontal splits, the new pane is placed to the right of the current
pane. If we would like to force the new pane to show up above or to the left of
the current pane, we can use the -b option, for "before," like so:
C-b :splitw -b
This creates our default vertical split, however, it will show up on top of our current pane. To have our new pane show up to the left of our current pane, we do:
C-b :splitw -hb
Easy peasy.
By default, splitw splits the current pane. This may not give us the control
we want. For example, let's say we have two panes open, one on the left and one
on the right. If we vertically split the pane on the right, that will give us
one large pane on the left and two smaller panes on the right. But what if we
want a pane that stretches across the bottom of both panes? This is where the
-f option, for "full," comes to the rescue. With it, you can create a pane
that is either the full width or full height of the entire window. Coupled with
the -b option, you can place the pane to the left, right, top or bottom of all
existing panes.
C-b :splitw -f
Places a full width pane on the bottom of our window with a vertical split.
C-b :splitw -bf
Places a full length pane at the top of our window with a vertical split.
C-b :splitw -fh
Places a full length pane on the right side of our window with a horizontal split.
C-b :splitw -bfh
Places a full length pane on the left side of our window with a horizontal split.
By default, the current pane gets split by tmux. But what if we don't want to
split the current pane and want to split a different one instead? Well, you
could switch to the other pane and issue the splitw command there. But there
is a better way, and that's with the -t option. Here, "t" stands for "target
pane", the pane we want to split.
Like our -l and -p options, the -t option takes an argument. The argument
is an integer representing the pane number we want want to split. This integer
is the called the pane's index. Here's how it's used:
C-b :splitw -t 2
This command splits pane #2 vertically. Pane numbering starts with zero so this is actually the third pane. But how do we know which index number a pane is? The pane in the top left is always pane 0 and the pane in the bottom right is always the last pane. But if we have a lot of panes open, it may not be so obvious what number a pane has. To solve this problem, tmux has a nifty key binding that briefly flashes the pane numbers in each pane:
C-b q
Each number is large and colored so it stands out in the pane. For very small panes, you might have to look closely because the index number will be small and hard to to spot. The active pane is given a different color than the inactive panes.
Normal humans don't start counting from "zero," they start at "one." This is
something we learned since long before Kindergarten. So you can't be blamed if
you don't like having the pane indexes beginning with zero. tmux, being a
flexible application that aims to please, lets you change this behavior to your
liking. To make this change, we need to introduce a new command, the
set-window-option. Like split-window, the set-window-option has an alias:
setw. The command looks like this:
C-b :setw option value
Using this command, we set the value of the option we supply to the value of the
argument we give. There are dozens of options built into tmux that we can
change. One of those options is called pane-base-index which tells tmux which
number to start numbering panes from. So, to tell tmux to start ordering panes
beginning with the number "1", we do:
C-b :setw pane-base-index 1
Now the first pane index number is "1" instead of "0". The second pane is now
"2", and so forth. We can verify this happened by typing in the C-b q key
binding and we'll see the first pane in the top left now flashes a "1". We are
not limited to using "1" for the index argument. If we wanted our first pane to
start with the number "50", we could do that (though we can't think of a good
reason why you would).
By default, the setw command only affects the current window we are in. If we
want to change our pane numbering for all current windows that are open and any
new windows we might open in the future, we need to explicitly tell setw that
with the -g option:
C-b :setw -g pane-base-index
Here, the "g" stands for "global." This terminology makes perfect sense if you are programmer, but might be a bit strange if you are not. If you think of "global" as a synonym for "everywhere," then you will be on the right track.
Note that this global option setting is not remembered by tmux. So if you shut
tmux down and restart it, any setw option we set will be lost. We will show
you how to make changes to the window option settings more permanent later.
By default, the directory the shell in the new pane is opened to, called the
"working directory," is set to the same directory tmux was launched from. You
can override this default by using the -c option, for "change directory," to
tell tmux which directory you'd prefer it to use for the new pane:
C-b :splitw -c '/home/johnnybgood/projects'
It's always a good idea to surround your path argument to -c in quotes in case
it has an spaces or other funny characters that might confuse tmux.
By default, tmux assumes you will want to do something in a new pane that is
opened. Therefore, it makes the new pane active so you can start typing into it
right away. But this may not always be desirable. We might just want to open a
pane to display something and continue working in our current pane. In that
case, we throw the -d option at splitw:
C-b :splitw -d
Now tmux will return us to our current pane after the new pane is created. The "d" stands for "detach" or "deactivate," if you prefer.
OK! This covers all the basic options for the splitw command. Actually, there is
one more basic option: -v, which does a vertical split. But since -v is
already the default, there is no reason to use it.
There are a couple of advanced options available with splitw, the -P and the
-F options. These options are useful for doing advanced automation of tmux.
But to try to keep this guide at a somewhat reasonable length and stay focused
on the basics, they are not covered by this guide.
So now that we've covered all the basic options, it's time to turn our attention to
passing a shell command to the splitw subcommand.
Options are cool and give us fine-tuned control over how panes are split, but
the real power of splitw is realized when we pass shell commands to it.
Learning this simple aspect of splitw is the first step to unlocking all kinds
of great ways to automate tmux, saving you a lot of tedious keystroke entry.
In a new tmux session or window, run this command:
C-b :splitw ls
If you didn't see any thing, then you must have blinked or you have an extremely
fast computer. Run the command a few more times to see if you can see something
happen. TIP: you can do C-b :<UP ARROW> to pull up the last command
from the tmux command line history to save you some typing.
So what happened here?
In the command above we passed the ls shell command to the splitw command.
tmux then ran the command in a new pane. When the command finished executing,
tmux killed the pane for us. This is the default behavior of tmux. So why, you
may ask, do the other panes stay open and not close immediately? It's because
they have a running process in them, an interactive shell that never stops
running until we command it.
To prove this to yourself, create a new split with C-b ". After the new pane
opens, type exit at the shell prompt. The pane vanishes! That's because we
exited the default shell command that tmux launched. Since the shell was what
kept the pane alive, the pane remained alive until the point we killed the shell
by leaving it.
Unlike a shell process, the ls command doesn't hang around waiting for us to
tell it what to do. It does its job and bails. When ls finished printing out
its list of files to the pane it exited and tmux dutifully killed the pane.
Alright, so now let's make our ls command useful for those of us who can't read quite so fast:
C-b :splitw 'ls | less'
Here we run the ls command except this time we "pipe" its output into the
less program using the | operator supplied by our shell. As a result, less
will be opened with the output of ls command displayed. Notice that the shell
command is surrounded in single quotes. This is important because our shell
command will not work properly without them because of the pipe operation. By
surrounding it with quotes, splitw passes everything between the quotes as one
large argument to the default shell command. So if we are using the bash shell,
here is the command tmux actually runs:
/bin/bash -c 'ls | less'
which then parses everything the way we expect it to. For simpler commands, we will usually leave out the quotes because it makes it easier to write commands that might contain other quotes. Without quotes, the command is run directly by tmux without sending it to the shell command. If you have done any shell scripting, you know that handling and escaping quotes in shell commands can be very tricky business.
After we run this command, we see the pane remains open. That's because the
less program does not quit until we tell it to. When we quit less with the q
key, tmux will detect that the less process ended and kills the pane. Nice!
Most of the shell commands you give will spawn a new process that doesn't die so you won't need to worry about the pane disappearing immediately. For example, if you are opening a document with vim, you can simply do:
C-b :splitw vim my_document.txt
In this case, vim will open up in the new pane with the document open. Once you quit vim, however, the pane will close.
Although this guide is specifically focused on the splitw command, we want to
cover a subcommand that can be considered a close cousin of splitw called
respawn-pane or respawnp for short. This subcommand can work hand-in-hand
with splitw's ability to send shell commands to a newly opened pane. It's
easiest to explain respawnp with a simple demonstration.
Start with a fresh, paneless window and open a new pane with the contents of
ls again:
C-b :splitw 'ls | less'
You should now have two panes and the new pane with the less command being the active one. To switch back to the original pane, do:
C-b ;
which is the key binding for jumping back to the last active pane. Now we wish to update the contents of our new pane with something else. So we do:
C-b :respawnp -k -t ! 'ls .. | less'
This command definitely needs a little explaining. It starts out with our usual
key binding to get us to the command line and then we see the subcommand,
respawnp. Next we see two options, -k, and then a -t, which has an
argument supplied to it, !. Lastly, we pass in the shell command.
The -k options tells our subcommand to kill the existing command running in a
pane. So in other words, we kill the first ls | less command which effectively
kills less and therefore the entire pane off. However, the respawnp command
will resurrect the pane with the output of the shell command we supply to it. In
this case, we output the listing of the directory above the current directory
(this is what the .. means). So, tmux effectively removes the listing of the
current directory for us and replaces it with a listing of the directory one
level up.
So what's the -t ! business? This is how we tell respawnp which pane we want
to kill off and respawn. You probably recall the -t option means "target
pane." We normally supply this option with an integer argument that represents
the index number of the pane we are going to kill. However, instead of a number
we have an exclamation point. The exclamation point is what's called a
token. In the context of the respawnp command, it represents the last
active pane. Note that we could have just as easily replaced the token with the
actual index number of the pane. But the token conveniently saves us from having
to do that. There are many other tokens available and we'll see one ore two more
later in the guide.
Now we are going to leave the beaten path a little more and explore some thicker underbrush of tmux.
As we have seen, tmux kills off panes once the process running inside them
exits. We can, however, change this behavior and keep these dead panes hanging
around. This requires us to mess with a tmux option called remain-on-exit.
Like the name indicates, it causes a pane to remain even after the process in it
exits. We turn this option on by giving it an on value like so:
C-b setw remain-on-exit on
Now let's quit the less process and see what happens. Make the pane running
less the active pane if it isn't already by doing C-b ;. Type in q to
quit less. You will now see the pane didn't close! Instead, the pane hangs
around, taking up space even though it has nothing to display. tmux displays a
little message for us, declaring the pane to be "dead," along with some other
bits of information we don't need to be concerned with.
But, it's not totally dead. We can use respawnp to breathe life back into the
zombie pane. Let's do that. Be sure to make the first pane active with C-b ;
and then run:
C-b :respawnp -t ! 'ls | less'
The dead pane will now be active again with a new process. Notice we didn't need
the -k option in this case because the dead pane didn't have any command
running that needed to be killed.
Let's say we want to open our ls output in a new pane but would like to return
to the originating pane after it opens. Here's how we do it:
C-b :splitw -d 'ls | less'
Notice that we placed the -d option (you'll recall stands for "detach")
immediately after the subcommand and before the shell command. Otherwise, the
command will not behave the way we expect. tmux can be very particular about the
order of the arguments to its subcommands.
OK, let's set the remain-on-exit window option back to its default and move
on:
C-b setw remain-on-exit off
Now that you know most of basic features of the splitw subcommand and some
related subcommands, we'll look at some more advanced type of splits using key
bindings. As we saw, tmux offers only two default key bindings for splits, one
for a vertical split and one for a horizontal split. We are going to improve on
this by learning how to use the bind-key subcommand, or bind for short.
But before we get there, we have to lay a little more groundwork and get up to speed on the inner workings of key bindings if we want to get the most out of them. As we mentioned earlier, there is a lot more to tmux's key bindings than what you get with your average hot key.
The first concept we need to introduce are key tables. A key table is
nothing more than a listing of key commands. A key command, as you may recall,
is the key followed by the prefix key, C-b. Each of the key commands in a key
table are bound to a specific tmux subcommand.
So far, all the key bindings we've used required us to type in the default
prefix key, C-b, before hitting our key command. What we didn't
mention before is that C-b tells tmux which key table to use. Each table has a
name. In the case of C-b, the key table name is, appropriately, "prefix." The
table contains a list of all the key commands that can be run after hitting the
C-b prefix key. Let's make this more clear by introducing a new command,
list-keys (aliased to lsk), to list all the key command listed in the prefix
key table:
C-b :lsk -T prefix
Now we see a long list of all the key commands that belong to the prefix key
table. The -T option, for "table," tells lsk to show us key commands only
for the tables we request. If we leave the -T option off, lskshows us all
the key commands from all the different key tables.
Look closely toward the top of the list, a few rows down. You should see a familiar face:
bind-key -T prefix " split-window
And there is, our key binding for the default split. Then a few rows below that, you'll see:
bind-key -T prefix % split-window -h
This, of course, it he key binding for a horizontal split.
Looking at these two rows more closely, we see each of them is a full bind-key
subcommand. First you see the bind-key subcommand followed by the -T option
followed by the name of the table the key command belongs to, followed by the
key command and then finally, the actual command that is run when key command is
pressed. This is convenient if we ever want to share these key bindings
somewhere else. We can just copy and paste the command directly.
For the very first command at the top of the key table, we see:
bind-key -T prefix C-b send-prefix
You would be tempted to think that this is how tmux knows that C-b uses the
prefix table. But you would be incorrect. Remember that this is a command key
that runs only after we hit C-b the first time. So the C-b we see in
command above only applies if we hit C-b a second time, at which point it
runs the send-prefix command. You can prove this to yourself by removing this
key binding with the unbind-key (alias: unbind) command:
C-b :unbind -T prefix C-b
This removes the C-b key command from the prefix table. Technically, we didn't
have to bother to tell unbind which key table to remove the key command from.
That's because if no -T option is supplied, it assumes we want to remove it
from the prefix key table. For all other key tables, we must specify the table.
OK, so what do you think will happen now when we run C-b %? Will it work? Try
it and you'll see that it does, in fact, still work and will create a horizontal
split. But now try hitting C-b C-b (two times) and then %. Now a literal %
character is generated! The first time we hit C-b we entered the prefix key
table as usual. But because we obliterated the C-b key command from the prefix
table, tmux no longer ran the send-prefix command when we hit C-b. Instead
it did nothing. After doing literally nothing, exactly what we told it to do
while switched to the prefix table. After doing nothing as instructed, it
interpreted the next % as a literal percent sign.
If you're paying attention, the next question you'll ask is, so what does tell
tmux that C-b should load the prefix key table? To answer that question
yourself, you can run this command (IMPORTANT: before running this command, hit
the q key first if you are still looking at the key table listing or you will
not see anything output):
C-b :show -g prefix
This outputs: prefix C-b to the pane. Here we introduce yet another subcommand,
show-options, or show for short. We are asking it to show us the value
of the global option called "prefix." We can see that this value is set to C-b
and this is how tmux knows to load the prefix key table when we type that in. Go
ahead an close out the current pane by hitting q.
Phew, we've covered a lot of ground here. And you thought you were just going to
learn about the splitw command. Ha! But don't relax just yet, the fun is just
about to get started.
Alright, it's time to get to work and start building our very own key table that
we will use to store more useful split commands. The first step is to decide on
a name. We'll call it "split" because we are going to use it mostly for running
split commands. Now let's go ahead and create a key binding in
our "split" key table with the bind subcommand:
C-b :bind -T split '"' splitw -d
Notice we have to place the double quotes inside of a set of single quotes or
you will confuse poor tmux. By default, tmux expects the " character to be
paired with another " character and gives special meaning to all the
characters in between them (this is why " is known as a "delimiter"). To make
sure tmux undertands what we want, we have to "delimit the delimiter" with
single quotes.
OK, while we're at it, let's create a second key binding:
C-b :bind -T split % splitw -hd
Now let's make sure we typed everything in properly and list the command we just added to the split key table:
C-b :lsk -T split
This should output:
bind-key -T split " split-window -d
bind-key -T split % split-window -hd
Beautiful! There is just one thing more to do. We need to tell tmux which key command should load the custom "split" key table so we can actually access the key commands we just set up.
What should we use? We're already using C-b for the prefix table so that's
out. Whatever we decide, we need to very careful with our selection. We don't
want to use a key that is useful to any of our apps we might run inside
tmux or those apps will no longer be able to no longer respond to it because
tmux hijackis it. Overrding another application's functionaity would be like
Alexa cutting the power to your HomePod and then giving you a weather report
whenever you asked Siri to to play music. One possible workaround to the problem
is to find a way to reprogram your HomePod to play music with a completely
different command. This would be the equivalent of changing the hot key in your
application. We'll leave these hard decisions up to you when they arise.
Anyway, we will choose C-\ because it is unlikely that another app uses it.
Here's subcommand to run to activate the "split" key table when we hit C-\,
the switch-client (switchc) subcommand:
C-b :bind -T root C-\ switch-client -T split
So what's going on here? We can see we are binding C-\ to the switch-client
command which we pass the "split" table to. But what is the -T root stuff?
The -T, as we have already seen, is the option for naming a key table. And
"root" is just the name of the table we are adding our new key command to.
Like the "prefix" table, the "root" table is a special table built into tmux. The significant thing about key commands in root is that they don't require us to type a key combination before they can be activated. It's a lot like being able to issue a subcommand to our favorite digital assistant without first saying "Hey Siri," "Alexa," or "Ok Google." So we have to be very careful about what goes in the root table. We don't want to put common, everyday keystrokes in there because we don't want tmux piping up all the time when we are trying to get work done in our applications. Therefore, placing key commands in the root key table should be done sparingly and reserved only for key combinations that activate tables or for key combinations that are extremely useful. For example, many tmux users map the pane navigation keys to C-h, C-j, C-k and C-l and place them in the root key table to let them move between panes much more quickly.
At any rate, go ahead and take a peek at the root key table with:
C-b :lsk -T root
As you might surmise from this list, the root table is used by tmux to interact
with mouse commands. You should also see the new C-\ key command we just
minted.
The mouse commands we see don't actually do anything because we haven't
activated the special mouse option tmux supplies (tmux assumes you are hard
core and don't need no stinkin' mouse). If you're not averse to indulging in a
little mouse activity from time to time, you can get tmux to respond to your
mouse by turning on the mouse option:
C-b :set -g mouse on
With this option turned on, tmux panes should now be able to respond to scrolls,
clicks, and drags on the pane border so you can quickly resize them. You can see
we are setting this command with the global option with -g which essentially
means we are changing this everywhere (it's a bit more complicated than that but
that is a topic of another guide). Another note of interest is that instead of
using setw, we use set to indicate that we are changing a session option not
a window option. We will leave it up to you investigate the different kinds of
options and what they mean on your own as they aren't directly related to the
splitw command. But you should at least be aware that there are different
kinds of options.
Alright, let's get back to the business at hand and see if our new key binding works:
C-\ %
Did it do what you expected? It should have generated a new pane except instead
of making the new pane activate, it keeps our original pane active because we
applied the -d switch to our split command. Awesome!
We'll remind you again that all the options and settings and key bindings we add and change from the tmux prompt will be lost if we restart tmux. Later, we'll show you how to make these settings more permanent. For now, we are going to continue adding new key bindings to give you a taste for what else is possible with our newfound abilities.
So we've created some key bindings to see how we can use them to add additional
options to the splitw command. Now let's show some more creative and useful
splitw subcommands that use shell commands to help you see some of the real
power of using tmux.
First, let's say you are learning tmux and you want to be able to quickly pop open its man page. Add this key binding:
C-b :bind -T split t splitw -f man tmux
C-\ t will now open up the tmux manual in a full width pane along the bottom of your
screen. Now let's add an option to quickly close it:
C-b :bind -T split q kill-pane -t {bottom}
Now we have a way to quit the bottom pane. Great! The {bottom} in this command
is another token that means, obviously, the "bottom" pane. As long as we don't
open another full length pane along the bottom, this will always close our man
page pane.
What if you want to open up a different man page? You could create a new key
binding for each frequently used man page, but that would be tedious and use up
a lot of precious command keys (but we'll show you a way around that, soon).
Instead, it's probably better to be able to enter the name of an arbitrary man
page. This can be accommodated with the command-prompt subcommand:
C-b :bind -T split m command-prompt -p 'man page name:' "splitw -f man '%%'"
Now try C-\ m and you'll see a prompt, "man page name:". Type in the name of
the man page and a new pane will pop open with any man page you desire. Super
cool! Be aware, however, if you make a typo in your man page name and the man
page doesn't exist, man will immediately exit with an error, the pane will die,
and you'll be left wondering why your man page isn't showing up.
We aren't going to break down the above command for you. Instead, we are going to do you a bigger favor and show you a neat trick for quickly looking it up yourself in the tmux man page. Add this monster command:
C-b :bind -T split s command-prompt -p 'man page name:','search term:' "splitw -f man '%%'; send-keys / %2 Enter"
Now do C-\ s to execute this command. At the first prompt, type in tmux. At
the second prompt, type in command-prompt. When the man page opens now, the
man page will move down to the first mention of "command-prompt" for you. Super
duper!
We do want to point out a couple of significant points from that last command.
First, look closely at the command sent to the command-prompt subcommand and
you'll see there are actually two different subcommands in there separated by a
semicolon: splitw -f man '%%' and send-keys / %2 Enter. The first command is our
familiar splitw command.
The second subcommand is send-keys or just send. "What's that?" you
say. Well, you don't have to ask us anymore, now you can find out for yourself
with C-\ m! We will say that if you are interested in automating your
applications, send is definitey a subcommand you will want to master. Like
splitw, learning the ins and outs of send will unlock a lot of power for
you. We highly recommend spending some time practicing with it.
As we start telling you to go RTFM, now would be a good opportunity to talk about how to actually RTFM. But there are lots of great tutorials on this topic already. If you are new to man pages, or you still find them intimidating, we'd like just suggest a video which we think is an excellent introduction to them: https://youtu.be/jyo0TwmON4A. It's slightly on the long side (is that such a bad thing?), so consider bumping the speed setting up to 1.5 or even higher if you want.
Once you are done with that video, spend at least 10 to 15 minutes browsing through the tmux man page. You don't have to understand all of it, but you should at least get familiar with how it's laid out and what the major sections of the page are. This will help you find things much more quickly when you need them. The more familiar you get with the tmux manual and how to read it, the more pleasant learning tmux will be for you.
One tip for getting around the tmux man page quickly is to search by a subcommand aliases to help find what you need more more quickly.
Before we leave the topic of key bindings, we wanted to show you a fairly advanced trick you can use to organize and access hundreds of custom key bindings very quickly. We call this method "chaining." It'll be easier show you first and then explain it.
We start by creating a key command, "t", to split a new pane across the top of our window. We will place this subcommand into a new key table called "split_f":
C-b :bind -T split_f t splitw -fb
To reach this key command, we are going to link a key command from our "split"
key table to our new "split_f" key table using the familiar switch-client
command:
C-b :bind -T split f switch-client -T split_f
Study these commands closely before reading on to see if you can figure out how this work.
You get it? Here's how it works. First you hit C-\ to activate the "split"
key table. Inside that table, is the "f" key, which activates the "split_f"
key table for us where the new "t" key command we created lives.
We can add additional split to the new "split_f" table to make it more useful:
C-b :bind -T split_f l splitw -hfb
A left split.
C-b :bind -T split_f r splitw -hf
A right split.
C-b :bind -T split_f r splitw -f
A bottom split.
Now, to create a left split, we can do:
C-\ fb
That's just 4 keystrokes. Very nifty. So now you can find all of your full
split with C-\ f and then choose the location of the split with the next key
command. There's nothing stopping your from creating a key command in the
"split_f" table to yet another key table reserved for even more fine-grained
types of splits. You can also set up a new key command in the "split" key table
that links to an entirely different key table called "split_d", for example.
Of course, there are only so many key bindings you'll be able to remember. But
if you organize them well and plan your key bindings carefully, you can have
hundreds of very powerful tmux commands at your disposal with just a few
keystrokes. Wowzers!
So you've seen some of the pretty cool things you can do with key bindings and the command prompt. tmux doesn't stop there, though. Using tmux configuration files and shell scripts, you can achieve extreme levels of automation if you are willing to put in a little work up front. Your future self will definitely thank you if you do.
Everything you just learned about how to run tmux from the tmux command prompt will serve you well when applying them to tmux configuration files and scripts. You'll be using pretty much all the same commands you just learned but you'll be storing them inside a file instead of inside of tmux's memory. This is a good thing. You wouldn't want to have to retype a few dozen key bindings and options into the tmux command line every time you started a new tmux server.
OK, let's get started by showing you the basics of a tmux configuration file.
Applications usually have a way for you to configure them to your liking. tmux
is no different. The main tmux configuration is found in your home directory in
a file called .tmux.conf. Like many configuration files, it has a dot in front
of it so it won't visually clutter up your directory listing. There can be dozens
of them. Hiding them also provides a very thin layer of security to protect
them from getting accidentally deleted or moved with a badly constructed
wildcard command.
To create the file, you will need to use your favorite text editing program. So
fire it up and start editing a new, blank document in your home directory called
.tmux.conf.
The tmux configuration file is exactly like a shell script. It's nothing more than a simple list of commands with some basic logic sprinkled throughout so it can make basic decisions based on the environment it finds itself in. We are not going to cover how to place anything more advanced than the most basic commands, however.
The only major difference between a tmux configuration file and a shell configuration script is that one is full of tmux subcommands and the other is full of shell commands. This makes sense because a tmux configuration file is meant to be read by tmux while a while a shell script is meant to be executed by your shell.
Adding commands is simple and works a lot like a shell script. You add one
command per line. If you put more than one command on a line, the commands have
to be separated with a semicolon. You can intersperse comments in the file with
the # character, just like with a shell script, to help you remember what some
of the more complex commands do when you look at it weeks, months, or years
later. Go ahead and copy and paste the following few lines the file and save it:
new -s my_sess # create new session
neww -n shell # create new window
set -g mouse on
splitw -hd
splitw -hd
bind -T split '"' splitw -d
bind -T split % splitw -hd
bind -T root C-\\ switch-client -T split
bind -T split t splitw -f man tmux
bind -T split q kill-pane -t {bottom}
bind -T split m command-prompt -p 'man page name:' "splitw -f man '%%'"
bind -T split s command-prompt -p 'man page name:','search term:' "splitw -f man '%%'; send-keys / %2 Enter"
bind -T split_f t splitw -fb
bind -T split f switch-client -T split_f
bind -T split_f l splitw -hfb
bind -T split_f r splitw -hf
bind -T split_f r splitw -f
As the comments indicate, the first two commands establish a new tmux session and open a new window with the names we provide. We'll leave it to you to check out the man page to learn more details about those commands. The rest of the commands are all familiar to you: we enable mouse support, then create two new panes, and then add in many of the key binding we covered earlier in the guide.
Let's see this in action. Find a free command prompt and kill your tmux server with this command:
tmux kill-server
Yes, there is a lot of killing and dying with tmux, isn't there?
Make sure the configuration file you created is saved to the right location and fire up a new tmux server:
tmux attach
It's important to add the attach subcommand here, otherwise tmux will start up
with two different sessions instead of just the one we created. You should now
be looking at three panes side-by-side with the first pane active. Go ahead and
try a few key binding to confirm they all work.
If so, congrats! You are an official graduate of the Tmux Scripting Academy.
There is, of course, much more you can do with a configuration script than add
some key bindings and splits. You can change colors, the tmux status bar, load
plugins, and change the many other aspects of tmux. But that is well beyond what
the purpose of this guide does, which is to show you just enough to be able to
use the configuration file with the splitw command. You will need to explore
the many other highly advanced configuration options and tmux commands on your
own.
Our last topic covers how to update and reload the configuration script. This is easy:
- Make the desire changes to the configuration file with the new subcommands
- Source the file with the
source-fileorsourcesubcommand to make the changes take effect:
source ~/.tmux.conf
Just like with the shell source command, the tmux source command reads the configuration script you tell it to and executes the commands inside of it.
If you're a new user to tmux, you'll probably be making a lot of changes to the
configuration file so consider creating a key binding to this command. Take a
look at your prefix table with lsk and see if there are any key bindings you
hardly use. Unless you really love the tmux clock, the C-b t binding for
displaying the time in the window is probably a good candidate for replacement.
Even if you're in full screen mode without the computer clock visible, who
doesn't have a watch or a phone or a clock in the room to glance at? To nuke it,
just replace it with the new key binding in the configuration file:
bind t source ~/.tmux.conf
There is no need to unbind the default key command first. You will, of course,
have to resource the configuration file from the command line before the new key
binding takes effect.
Now that you know how to automate running tmux subcommands, you can take things to the next level and automate the automation of the tmux subcommands and perhaps bring on the technological singularity.
We kid, of course.
But shell scripting does have far more advanced features than tmux subcommands and opens up new possibilties that would be difficult or impossible to pull off with just a plain tmux configuration file. And you aren't limited to using a shell script either. You can use just about any programming language you wish to automate tmux. But why do work that's already been done? There are many very cool tmux session managers available for you to download that you may find very useful.
Alas, this is well beyond learning about our relatively low-level splitw
command. And it is now time to bid adieu. We hope we have helped you take
you first big step toward mastering tmux.
Alright, alright. We're throwing in a little bonus material for you: some suggestions for making it easier to navigate tmux panes.
The easiest way tmux provides to move between split panes that's built into tmux is:
C-b o
This moves us to the pane with the next index number of the pane we are in
in. The first and last panes are connected together so when we get to the last
pane, C-b o returns us to the first in the window.
C-b o is great if we have only two panes open and fine for three, but it's not
so great if we have four or more panes open. If we are in the first pane and
want to get to the last pane, we have to perform 3 keystrokes for each pane in
between. This is tedious and annoying.
We can improve upon this a little with four other key bindings that tmux provides:
C-b Up
C-b Down
C-b Left
C-b Right
The directions you see there should be replaced by the arrow keys on your
keyboard. So to move down to the next pane in the window, you do C-b Down and
you can keep issuing more pane movement commands until you get to your desired
pane. Because the first and last panes are linked together, you can jump
between the first pane and the last pane quickly by issuing a C-b Left or
C-b Up. Similarly, if you are in the last pane and want to jump back to
the first, you can do C-b Right or C-b Down.
Note that these command keys are "repeat" command keys. That means we don't have
to do C-b Right, C-b Right, C-b Right three times to move three panes to
the right. Instead, we can do: C-b Right Right Right, which is convenient. See
the tmux documentation for the bind subcommand for more details.
Still, three keystrokes to move between a pane is a bit of a pain (har har), and the arrow keys can still be very tedious to use if we have a lot of panes open especially since the arrow keys require us to move our entire hand which slows our typing down considerably.
tmux does supply a subcommand to jump straight to another pane with the
select-pane subcommand. It's alias is selectp. In its simplest incantation,
you do:
C-b :selectp -t pane_index_number
So, to jump to pane #4, you do C-b :selectp -t 4. But this is impractical and
impossibly slow. Even if we use tab completion effectively, that's 13 or 14
keystrokes just to move to a pane! So selectp is hardly a good solution. It
is, however, a very useful command for scripting tmux and for creating custom
key bindings, which we will now cover.
So, out of the box, tmux doesn't give provide great options for moving between panes. Let's see how we can improve the situation. There are a couple of things we can do.
One common practice is to add the following key bindings to the root key table:
bind -T root C-h selectp -L
bind -T root C-j selectp -D
bind -T root C-k selectp -U
bind -T root C-l selectp -R
Since we're adding this key command to the root key table, there is no need to type in the prefix key. What's equally great about this solution is your right hand never has to move off the home row and so this is very fast. The downside to this is that it may interfere with the shortcut keys in your applications. But having such a convenient way to navigate panes might be worth it for you.
Another possibility is to set up key bindings that will jump to a pane's index number in a new prefix table.
bind -T your_key_table 0 selectp -t 0
bind -T your_key_table 1 selectp -t 1
bind -T your_key_table 2 selectp -t 2
bind -T your_key_table 3 selectp -t 3
bind -T your_key_table 4 selectp -t 4
bind -T your_key_table 5 selectp -t 5
bind -T your_key_table 6 selectp -t 6
bind -T your_key_table 7 selectp -t 7
bind -T your_key_table 8 selectp -t 8
bind -T your_key_table 9 selectp -t 9
This can be faster than the previous solution especially if you are jumping across several panes. Though you will still need a key command to activate your custom key table before you can access the key commands listed above. We'll leave setting up that key command as an exercise for you.
You should now know just enough to bootstrap your way to learning more about tmux and what it can do. Of course, you also want to use it to get real work done. Unless you aspire to be a professional tmux trainer, learning tmux should not be your full time job.
So our best advice is to go ahead an start using tmux. Use it all the time. Program your terminal to automatically attach to a tmux session when you open it. But be sure to keep things simple at first. Get comfortable working with just one window with multiple panes. When that starts to feel too limiting, start learning how to create new windows. When you get comfortable working with many windows in a single session, begin learn about running multiple tmux sessions. When you're starting to feel like a real pro, see if there are any advantages to running multiple tmux servers.
There will be things that will frustrate you or confuse you about tmux and things that will feel very restrictive and limiting at first. You will be tempted to turn to plugins to "fix" tmux's perceived limitations. We don't want to discourage you from installing plugins, but we encourage you to be very selective. Carefully research what each plugin does and how it does it because the plugins may just add to your confusion and provide capabilities you aren't ready to take advantage of. They will also hide which features are native to tmux and which ones are provided by the plugins. So as much as possible, keep your use of plugins limited until you gain a lot more confidence with tmux. Look closely at the subcommands the plugin adds to your configuration file. A good rule of thumb is that if you can't figure out what the plugin's subcommands do, don't add them to your configuration.
Finally, we covered only one subcommand in depth today and a few options. There are hundreds, if not thousands of different subcommands and settings for you to explore. Treat tmux like a musical instrument and try to set aside 15 or 20 minutes each day praciting and experimenting with new commands and options.
A great place to find other important subcommands to study is right there in your prefix table. Take some time see which subcommands tmux is using for the default key bindings. Try each of them out and see what happens. Figure out which key bindings are useful to you. Get rid of the ones you'll rarely need and replace them with your own. Then create your own key table and start adding your own custom key bindings. Be sure to add the good ones to your configuration file. There's no better way to learn tmux quickly than by experimenting with it.
When you experiment, be sure to run them in a "clean" tmux environment without any configuration file (or at least a very limited one) so you can be sure it is working as the developers intended. Feel free to take notes and cheatsheets to help you remember all that you learn. If you follow this advice diligently, you will be a master tmuxer in no time.
Oh yeah, and one more thing...
This is really good - thanks @sdondley! Can we look forward to more insightful adventures in tmux?