Remapping the split window keys in tmux
October 10, 2020 ‐ 2 min read
In tmux you can split your panes horizontally with <prefix> " and vertically with <prefix> % by default. I quite often forgot these keybindings so wanted to remap them to something more meaningful.
I decided on <prefix> - to split vertically and on <prefix> \ to split horizontally. I would prefer | over \, but it requires me to press an extra key.
This seems counterintuitive, because well, a hyphen(-) is horizontal and a backslash(\) is vertical. But if you see how tmux splits windows it makes more sense.
A tmux window that is split horizontally looks as follows. It is split from left to right, with a pane border in the middle. Hence the backslash.
+–––––––––+–––––––––+
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
+–––––––––+–––––––––+
You can add the bindings for <prefix> - and <prefix> \ by putting the following in your ~/.tmux.conf file. I unbind the default bindings as well, so I can reuse them for something else if I need to.
# ~/.tmux.conf
# Split panes with \ and -
bind \\ split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}"
bind - split-window -v -c "#{pane_current_path}"
unbind '"'
unbind %
Take notice that you need to escape the backslash, that's where the bind \\ comes from.
In most cases I like the new split to be in the directory as I am currently in. So I added the option -c "#{pane_current_path}" to do so. If you don't prefer this you're set with the following configuration.
# ~/.tmux.conf
# Split panes with \ and -
bind \\ split-window -h
bind - split-window -v
unbind '"'
unbind %
Learn more
A great resource for learning more about tmux are its man pages. You can read them online here or from the command-line using the following command:
$ man tmux
Or take a look at this book: