Keyboard

The prefix

Ctrl+B, then a key — tmux’s model, and configurable. The status bar’s right-hand chip shows the prefix, and turns accent-coloured with a list of what is available while it is armed, because a mode you cannot see is how a stray keystroke closes a pane.

Every binding can be changed, and a no-prefix keymap where everything is a direct chord is supported.

Defaults

Key	Does
%	Split into columns
"	Split into rows
← ↑ ↓ →	Move focus
Shift + arrow	Resize toward that edge
x	Close the focused pane
c	New tab here
v	New tab, tabs down the side
e	New empty pane
n / p	Next / previous tab
< / >	Move this tab earlier / later
,	Rename the pane
.	Pin or unpin the pane, so closing a pane leaves it alone
/	Find in this pane
:	Command palette
w	Save the session
o	Open windows tray
t	Terminal here (from the file browser’s selection)
i	Set up shell directory reporting
a	Switch a hosted application between embedded and alongside
1–5	Open cmd, Windows PowerShell, pwsh, WSL, the file browser
b	Send a literal Ctrl+B to the pane

Inside a terminal, Shift+PageUp / PageDown scroll the history and Ctrl+Shift+Home / End jump to either end. Unshifted PageUp is never intercepted — it belongs to whatever is running in the pane. Anything you type returns the view to the live screen.

Copy and paste work the way Windows Terminal does. Select with the mouse, then Ctrl+C copies it; with nothing selected, Ctrl+C is the interrupt it always was. Ctrl+V pastes text.

Right-click does what the console does, so the habit works: with a selection it copies and the highlight goes away, and with nothing selected it pastes. The middle button does nothing — pasting on a wheel press is an X11 convention, and a stray one that types into a shell is not worth it. Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+V and Shift+Insert work too. A program that copies for you — Claude Code, vim’s "+y — reaches the Windows clipboard (OSC 52); programs can write to the clipboard but never read it.

Pasting an image into Claude Code — press Alt+V, as in Windows Terminal. If the clipboard holds an image and no text, Ctrl+V is passed through to the program as well, so either works.

Multi-line pastes arrive as one paste when the program asks for bracketed paste, so a pasted block does not run line by line. Alt combinations, Shift+Tab, function keys and modified arrows (Ctrl+Left and so on) reach the program as a terminal program expects them.

When a pane wants you

A program in a pane can ask for attention — Claude Code waiting on a permission, a build that finished, a bare bell. When it does and you are not looking at that pane, an accent dot appears on its tab, and hovering the tab says what it asked. The dot goes when you look at the pane, however you get there: clicking the tab, the prefix keys, or the command palette.

It follows the Notifications setting in Settings, so turning notifications off turns the dots off too, and setting it to messages only leaves a bare bell unmarked. A pane in a split with no tab group of its own has no tab to mark; the status bar still says it, and a Windows notification still appears.

Moving tabs

Drag a tab to move it. Along its own strip to reorder it, or onto another group’s strip to move it there — including a group in a different split. While you drag, a caret shows the gap the tab will drop into, the strip about to take it is outlined in the accent colour, and the tab you picked up fades where it sits. The pane goes on running while it moves: a terminal keeps its shell and its scrollback, a file browser keeps its directory. Dropping on the empty part of a strip puts the tab at the end.

Ctrl+B < and Ctrl+B > do the same reordering from the keyboard, within the current group.

Links

Ctrl+click a URL to open it. Hold Ctrl and the link under the pointer is underlined and the cursor becomes a hand, so you can see what will open before you commit to it. Both kinds work: a link a program marked up with OSC 8, and a plain http:// or https:// sitting in ordinary output.

A plain click never opens anything — it starts a selection, as it should in a terminal. Only http and https open. A pane shows the output of whatever is running in it, and a file: URL is a local path while a registered custom scheme is a program with an argument somebody else chose; neither is something a click on a word should reach.

In a file-browser pane

These need no prefix; they act on the selection in the pane that has focus. Ctrl+click and Shift+click select several entries, and everything below except rename acts on all of them.

Key	Does
Enter	Open the folder
Backspace	Parent folder
F5	Refresh
Ctrl+Shift+N	New folder
F2	Rename
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X	Copy / cut
Ctrl+V	Paste here
Delete	Delete to the Recycle Bin
Shift+Delete	Delete permanently, after confirming
Ctrl+Enter	Open a terminal here

Right-click gives the same list with the shortcuts beside it. Copy in one pane and paste in another: the clipboard is shared between file-browser panes, which is most of the reason to have two. It works between different filesystems too — cut on an SFTP server, paste into a local folder, or the other way round — and the pane you moved something out of updates by itself.

Drag and drop works between any two panes, whatever each is showing — a local folder, a network share, an SFTP or FTP server. Within one filesystem a drag moves, across two it copies; hold Ctrl to force a copy or Shift to force a move, as in Explorer. Drop on a folder to put things inside it. Files dragged in from Explorer or the desktop can be dropped on any pane, a server included, and files in a local pane can be dragged out to Explorer. Files on a server cannot be dragged straight to Explorer — drop them on a local pane instead.

Each pane says what it is showing — This PC, Network share, or the server and account (SFTP · alice@build.example.com) — and lists name, date modified, type and size. Click a heading to sort by it, and click again to reverse.

Nothing here overwrites. Pasting onto a name that exists produces report (2).txt, and so does renaming onto one, so a collision never costs you the original file.

Keyboards that are not American

A binding written as a character — %, :, " — is matched against the character your keyboard produces, not the key that produces it on a US keyboard.

This is not theoretical. On a Japanese 106/109 keyboard : is an unshifted key and " is Shift+2, where a US layout puts them on Shift+; and Shift+'. Matching by physical key meant the command palette and split-rows had no working shortcut at all on that hardware. Bindings written as a key (Ctrl+B, Left, F5) still match by key, and always win over a character match.

Everything has four ways in

The prefix is the fast path, never the only one. Every action is also a toolbar button, an entry in the command palette, and a CLI command — all four dispatch the same named action, so there is one implementation and four ways to ask for it.

wmux split -h
wmux focus left
winmux palette
winmux action move-tab-later

The palette lists every action by name with its shortcut, which is how you stop needing the palette.