For a year or two now I’ve been using tmux. It starts itself with a hook in my ~/.fish as soon as I open up a terminal. Once tmux is open there’s no need for other terminal windows or tabs. I use one ‘session’ per project. Each session has ‘windows’, each window has ‘panes’.
It took until today for me to figure out how to properly copy and paste. I did it a few times, but for whatever reason it never stuck. Now it does. All the code in this post was copied straight from TMUX.
How did I get by without pasting for so long? vim has the unnamed register ("+), which pulls from the system clipboard with the right configuration. pbcopy/pbpaste are essential. But the last resort, option + click-and-dragging the text I wanted and using the system clipboard, was impossible with vertically split panes. It copies all the text you want frmo the target pane, but the unrelated second pane is interleaved line by line, separated by | characters and whitespace.
The relevant lines from my ~/.tmux.conf, with comments:
setw -g mode-keys vi # vim-style movement
# in normal tmux mode
bind Escape copy-mode # `tmux prefix + Escape` starts copy mode.
bind p paste-buffer # `prefix + p` pastes the latest buffer
# in copy mode…
bind -t vi-copy v begin-selection # `v` begins a selection. (movement keys to select the desired bits)
bind -t vi-copy y copy-selection # `y` copies the current selection to one of tmux's "paste buffers"
bind -t vi-copy V rectangle-toggle # `V` changes between line- and columnwise selection
bind -t vi-copy Y copy-end-of-line # ^1
bind + delete-buffer
I like Y to yank the current line, which is what ^1 does.
In copy-mode you can jump around with almost all the commands that work in vim. / and ? work to search. There are no motions, so you can’t y5w or yap.
Once you’ve copied some stuff, you can do more than just paste the last thing:
# List all paste buffers.
- Delete the most recently copied buffer of text.
= Choose which buffer to paste interactively from a list.
[ Enter copy mode to copy text or view the history.
] Paste the most recently copied buffer of text.
(I have [ remapped to Escape and ] remapped to p. I use - for split-window -v, so I moved delete-buffer to +.)
tmux remembers old buffers and prefix + = lets you paste them arbitrarily!
Next up is running tmux > ssh > tmux for split panes server-side without multiplexing ssh connections.
Postscript: you can check all the vi-copy mode keys with tmux list-keys -t vi-copy. tmux list-keys prints all the current bindings, so if you’re wondering about something you can tmux list-keys | grep <something>. prefix + ? from inside tmux opens the same list.