Two Simple Tmux Keybinds that Help Me Everyday

I have been using tmux for a while now, but I still need some help. Two keybinds help me day by day.

Helpful keybinds

They are literally helpful. When I started using tmux I of course didn’t know any keybinds. There is a builtin help menu by using the keybind ?, but I wanted to level that up.

All the keybinds are listed there, but I can’t search them and manually looking through each one is frustrating. So I made one that is searchable via fzf.

unbind-key ?
bind-key ? run-shell 'tmux neww -n "help" "tmux list-keys -N | fzf"'

The binding opens a new tmux window with the name help and it lists all the available keybinds and pipes it into fzf. With this I can quickly search for something like “split vertically”.

There is more! I use zimfw which is like oh-my-zsh but faster. I discovered that it comes with default aliases. I want to learn those too because Gcm is faster than git commit --message. So I made a quick fzf bind for that too.

bind-key a run-shell 'tmux neww -n "aliases" "source ~/.zshrc && alias | fzf"'

Here it’s a good thing to know that by using alias all the configured aliases are listed to stdout. Also, if you use bash instead of zsh then change .zshrc to .bashrc.

Put the upper mentioned two keybinds into your .tmux.conf and start learning the shortcuts which make your workflow faster!

If you are interested in more of this type of content then I suggest you to read posts from my series about improving my setup and developer productivity.