Panes — Split, Navigate, Resize

One window, many shells, all visible at once

Keys: Ctrl-B %, Ctrl-B ", Ctrl-B o, Ctrl-B z, Ctrl-B x, Ctrl-B q

Panes are independent shells inside one window. Split with %, ", navigate with arrows or hjkl, zoom one full-screen with z, close with x.

Panes

A pane is one shell inside one rectangle. A window can hold any number of panes. The active pane is the one your keystrokes go to; tmux marks it with a brighter border (and a status-bar indicator). Splitting, navigating, zooming, and closing panes are the operations you'll do most often in tmux.

Keys Action
Ctrl-B% Split current pane left/right
Ctrl-B" Split current pane top/bottom
Ctrl-Bo Cycle to the next pane
Ctrl-B; Toggle to the previously-active pane
Ctrl-BUp Down Left Right Move focus in that direction
Ctrl-Bh j k l Same, if you remap (see below)
Ctrl-Bz Toggle zoom — the pane fills the whole window
Ctrl-Bx Kill the current pane (confirm with y)
Ctrl-Bq Show pane numbers; press 0–9 to jump
Ctrl-B! Break the pane out into its own window
Ctrl-BSpace Cycle through preset layouts
Ctrl-B{ Swap pane with previous
Ctrl-B} Swap pane with next

hjkl Navigation

Default tmux uses the arrow keys for pane navigation. Most Vim users prefer hjkl for the same reason they use hjkl in Vim — home row stays under your fingers. To enable, add to ~/.tmux.conf:

bind h select-pane -L
bind j select-pane -D
bind k select-pane -U
bind l select-pane -R

Note that this shadows tmux's default Ctrl-Bl ("last window"). The standard fix is to rebind last-window to a key tmux doesn't otherwise use:

bind Tab last-window

Watch

See also: The Prefix Key, Windows, Creating Splits