Tmux lets you select and copy text with your keyboard

I don't think that's fair: this is not news to anyone who has ever used tmux. This post was written for people who have never tried tmux, but who might want to if they knew about this feature. I think tmux actually has good command discoverability (once you install it) -- prefix + question mark lists all the keybindings, with user-friendly descriptions of what they do.

That said, I agree with your larger point completely -- I love Sublime's command palette, and I love using ivy/counsel for M-x in emacs. It would be even better if tmux had something like that.

> Sublime text and jetbrains products have it down so well to the point of me not needing to memorize key shortcuts.

Right, but you dont run things _inside_ sublime text. Keep in mind tmux has to play well with hundreds of existing shortcuts that people expect to work.

When you are attached to a tmux, you don't want to override the shortcuts of something you may run inside the tmux.

All the terminal shortcuts are expected to work (Ctrl-E, Ctrl-Arrow, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-Q, etc..). All main program shortcuts are expected to work (vim, emacs, etc) And of course not desirable to override screen shortcuts.

I first encountered the fuzzy search command bar shortly after I started using Mac OS X 20 years ago when I discovered LaunchBar. This revolutionized my computer usage. Basically bringing the power of CLI to GUI

It took quite a few years fir this to be picked up by SublimeText, but wow that was another huge boost. No longer needing to learn tons of keyboard commands to navigate an application.

I wish an OS would deeply bake this idea in. Apple has done good job with Spotlight for the system level (I still use LaunchBar on my own systems) , but I want this functionality to be shared between System and Apps

I learned of byobu several years ago from a coworker. I think of it as (but may be technically incorrect) a wrapper on top of tmux (or optionally screen; behaves the same-ish either way?)

It's hotkeys are... less arcane to remember by virtue of being primarily the F-keys at the top of the keyboard. https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/eoan/en/man1/byobu.1.ht...

> The fact an article like this exists speaks to how bad the keyboard shortcuts for tools like tmux are

Well, tmux is not an editor but a terminal multiplexer — its keyboard shortcuts are like this as to make sure they don’t interfere with any editor’s shortcuts running in the terminal.

Cringe. The copy and paste buffer is inspired by vi btw. Do you have a problem with vi in addition to tmux?

That is to say, it's dead simple once it's explained to you. The issue is with documentation, not the keyboard shortcuts themselves.

Sublime Text and Jetbrains are also vi-inspired. For where Jetbrains doesn't go far enough there is a vim mode plugin. I would say these are strong indicators of vi's dominance among keyboard shortcut layouts.

The general problem with these kinds of TUI apps isn't the shortcuts but the complete lack of discoverability of the commands and their shortcuts. The expectation that people have to go and the read the documentation and then memorise the shortcuts is ridiculous.

GUIs for decades have demonstrated practical ways of making commands discoverable and also teaching users the keyboard shortcuts. All without having to ask people to RTFM. It is a pity that so many TUI apps haven't learnt the same lessons.

There is a reason why Nano became such a popular default editor for email. The shortcuts are printed at the bottom of the screen(!)

I hope more TUI apps pick up on the idea of the command palette though. It is a fast and keyboard friendly way of improving usability.

Completely agree. I love these tools, but the usability (and defaults) are awful

Not to mention they all seem to come from an "old unix" perspective, with weird combinations and few use of bound combinations

Hence why I prefer keeping my terminal tabs not on tmux but on iTerm (or your favourite terminal emulator - except for the Gnome one)

Thats completely unfair to the point of being plain wrong.

For a start tmux does have similar interfaces, ability to search all panes etc.

Also comparing tmux to an ide is also possible wrong.

I've been messing with Emacs lately, tab completion in M-x is amazing. The editor is surprisingly discoverable because of its "minibuffer" command window.

Tmux is a great replacement for screen, but it's true that keyboard shortcuts are atrocious, I think every shortcuts that I use daily are remapped in my tmux.conf. Also when I copy in tmux it automatically change the clipboard and vice-versa, very useful to copy errors or paste snipped of code from internet. And with 'mode-keys vi' it's even faster.

Same, I thought I'd be cool and learn tmux (after 25 years of Linux/Unix use). After a year I realized it's just easier to learn the keyboard shortcuts of my favorite terminal client and tile the windows.

I've had no trouble reading a guide to tmux's keyboard shortcuts and then using them.

Have you tried k9s [1]? Just being able to run common operations directly on k8s entities is so much better than having to run a separate command. It also uses vi-style hotkeys.

[1]: https://k9scli.io/

That's all fine, but why not use kubectl's excellent tab completion?

    kubectl delete pod <tab>

and it lists the pods.

For bash or zsh:

    source <(kubectl completion $(basename $SHELL))

This sounds terribly convoluted compared to turning on mouse mode and selecting the text with your mouse. It should copy immediately after you release the button, and you should be able to paste with your standard shortcut if you set up tmux to use the clipboard of your choice.

Can you give me the bare minimum tmux config that does what you are saying? ALl these tutorials in this thread don't do anything (i just installed tmux and I'm using iTerm 3 and oh-my-zsh on OSX). I'm assuming because my tmux config is empty (I also dont want to disable other features like the original link because I use tmux for actually attaching to sessions)

I think this may be an iTerm thing. By default, using the steps you've posted, the highlighted text will not go to a system clipboard.

FYI, you can use vim's clipboard register * on linux/Mac (might be + on Windows?) to make it use the system clipboard.

(Or `:set clipboard=unnamed`)

Oh, yeah. I can't keep multiple clipboards straight. I configure everything to share the OS clipboard (except my shell... but I don't really use my shell's copy buffer since I got in the habit of using ctrl-q).

tmux will copy to your system clipboard by default if your terminal emulator supports the right escape sequences. If it doesn't, then you do need to configure it to shell out to xclip or pbcopy or whatever. It's annoying, but I find it less annoying to configure it than to try to keep multiple copy buffers straight.

Echoing others: I have the tmux copy/paste mapped to my system pasteboard. Ditto nvim. I do not use the shell buffers.

The cognitive load you are concerned about can be configured away, and for me is a solved problem.

I use the vi mode for tmux and my shell (zsh). I configured tmux and neovim to copy into the system clipboard (not for the shell, I did not search to be honest)

Thus to copy I use the y (yield) key, with optional selection keys like iw (in word), t<char> (to <char> included), f<char>( to <char> not included), etc.

But my mouse selection copy works differently between vim and tmux. In vim, when I select text with the mouse I have to press y to copy it. In tmux it is copied without pressing any key. So there is improvement here because often the paste fails after selecting text in vim because I forgot to press the y key.

tmux is what made drop tiling window managers after I realized I was only using tiling in a terminal. (I use Gnome on Linux.)

It's three. The shell doesn't do copy-paste, unless you mean the terminal emulator, but then that's copy-paste as in "the OS". This is actually great because you get many more cut buffers this way. There used to be a utility called xcb(1) to manage X11 cut-buffers (yes, there's more than one!), but even so, that requires too much mouse use. With tmux and vi/vim/emacs you get many cut-buffers. If, like me, you run a $EDITOR per-pane, then the tmux cut buffers are most useful when cutting and pasting between panes, while $EDITOR cut buffers are most useful when cutting and pasting within a file.

That's sick and good to know. I can use that on my current project.

To add to this, I have used tmux for automated testing of full-screen interactive command-line apps. It comes out like PhantomJS: send-keys + capture-pane is pretty awesome (once you overcome dumb timing stuff).

You might want to look into expect(1).

Yep. This is a killer feature for me. I have a ton of scripts that open new split screens and ssh into things to tail logs or others that ssh, change users, start some other console/repl/shell, then run a few commands in that. I'm sure there's better ways to do it but it's been enough to speed up a lot of the simple repetitive things for me.

Alacritty is a different thing from tmux. Alacritty is a terminal, tmux runs in a terminal. They go well together.

Oh, cool! I've never heard of alacritty.

I tried playing with it but it doesn't seem to recognize my control key (???) which makes a lot of things... hard. A quick google and glance through the settings didn't reveal any likely culprits, but I expect it's some macOS thing. Anyone know what's up with that?

That looks great! Someone also pointed me at tmux thumbs, which takes a more vimium approach to this. I've got to try both of these.

https://github.com/fcsonline/tmux-thumbs

asciinema demo here:

https://asciinema.org/a/232775?autoplay=1

extrakto is really a "killer" plugin. I'm starting to wish for an emacs plugin with similar functionality.

I tried this once, but I can't recall why I stopped.

Do you have any particular issue? Does it give you a real tty?

Is that very different from the Terminal in Vim 8.1+?

Yes, but it's a shame that tmux is not a good "x11 citizen". If you select some text inside tmux, you cannot middle-click on another window to copy it. Likewise, if you select some text on a non-tmux window, you can copy it everywhere, except on your tmux session. For me this means that the mouse support is severely broken, and I actually prefer to use "tmux set mouse off", by which all goodies are lost, but at least I can copy-paste like a human being.

If you weren't already aware, you can just drag the selected text slightly and it will retype it at the current prompt position, without dirtying your clipboard. QTerminal does the same on Linux, and likely other terminal emulators, too

Or if you are copying it out of iTerm, replace "slightly" with "to the other terminal" :-)

This should work the same locally & on remote hosts. Tmux doesn't care that you're ssh'd into some host.

As long as your system & version of tmux supports copying to the local clipboard, you should have no problems pasting with either Ctrl/Cmd+v or `Ctrl+b ]`.

Otherwise, if the clipboard is broken for some reason, you can stick to using `Ctrl+b ]` to paste.

It... depends.

If your terminal emulator supports the clipboard escape codes, then yes -- it just works, and there's nothing for you to do to set it up. This is because when you hit "copy" tmux just prints a bunch of escape codes, and ssh will re-print the escape codes locally, and your terminal emulator will see them, and know to set the contents of the system clipboard.

If your terminal emulator doesn't support the clipboard escape codes, then you have to configure an explicit copy-pipe command, like this:

  bind -T copy-mode-vi y send -X copy-pipe 'xclip -i -selection clipboard'

And that will work on a remote tmux, as long as you ssh to the remote server with X forwarding (ssh -X or -Y).

If you're not using X and your terminal emulator doesn't support the escape codes, then I think the answer is no. Like if you're using a Mac and using Terminal.app instead of iTerm, I'm not sure how you would make this work.

You can do that!

  tmux capture-pane -p -S - | vim -

Or bind that to a key. -p is "print to stdout", -S specifies where to start and - means "the beginning of history" (by default capture-pane just gives you the visible contents). I'm not sure how to do the same thing with the current selection -- copy-pipe doesn't seem to work with vim, for some reason.

Ctrl+a ESC arrows to start Enter arrows to end Enter. Ctrl+a ; to paste? .. of the top of my head

Came to say that

- ctrl-a [

- move to the text you want

- press space to start selection

- press space to end selection

- go to another screen, ctrl-a ] to paste

copy mode and scrollback in gnu screen is great to quickly scan tail -f commands.

If you set up this binding:

  bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-pipe-no-clear 'xclip -i -selection primary'

(or -T copy-mode, if you use emacs-flavored tmux)

Then you can paste your tmux selections into other programs with middle-click -- I think by default tmux only uses the "clipboard" selection, but middle click pastes the "primary" selection.

Presumably you need some callback attached to tmux set-buffer to make an xclip -i call

But my tmux-fu isn't really up to scratch on how you do that...

You can have your mouse copy and get you out of copy mode like this:

  # native mode, if your terminal supports it
  bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-selection-and-cancel

  # or if you're using X, and want it to work like any other program
  bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel 'xclip -i -selection primary'

The scroll thing is a little hairier looking:

  bind -n WheelUpPane if -Ft= "#{mouse_any_flag}" { send -M } { if -Ft= "#{pane_in_mode}" { send -M } { copy-mode -t= }

That's just the default binding for WheelUpPane, except using bare copy-mode instead of copy-mode -e (-e is auto-exit when you scroll to the bottom).

TIL `:term`. I've been using vim/tmux (and before that, vim/screen) for nearly 30 years. I never knew about `:term` before that, thanks for posting.

PS: And when the terminal session exits, the history is still a vim buffer - that's awesome!

I've used Tmux for around 8 years, and I've never had a pleasant copy/paste experience. This is not for lack of reading plenty of Google search results, installing different plugins, aliasing long command strings, to keyboard shortcuts. In the end, I'm still back where I started. I grab my mouse, highlight the text and pray that it's not longer than what fits on the page. I then hit Control+Shift+c, and I have the text on my clipboard. I've heard that there is a way to do this in a more vim-like fashion, but I've never actually gotten it to work. I used "Copy mode" every single day to be able to read what's in my scrollback buffer (test results, error output, etc) but using a key to start highlighting and copying contents to my clipboard? Man, that'd be awesome.

Biggest reason why I stick to urxvt.

But you can configure it. And it is quite usable even without it. The copy-buffer exist for all tmux session on the same system (tmux-server) so you can share between different panes/windows in current session as well as other sessions.