Workspaces & Terminal

Tabs & panes

How tabs work inside a workspace, how to split panes, and the shortcuts that move focus between them.

A workspace is divided into panes, and each pane holds a stack of tabs. Splits give you parallel views; tabs let one pane host multiple shells without stealing screen space.

Tabs

Every tab is a real shell attached to a tmux session. The tab title comes from the foreground process — type vim and the tab renames itself; quit and it goes back to the directory name.

Action macOS Linux / Windows
New tab ⌘T Ctrl+T
Close tab ⌘W Ctrl+W
Previous tab ⌘⇧[ Ctrl+Shift+[
Next tab ⌘⇧] Ctrl+Shift+]
Go to tab 1–9 ⌃1 – ⌃9 Alt+1 – Alt+9

Drag a tab in the tab bar to reorder it. The + button at the end of the tab bar opens the same template picker as ⌘T.

Templates beyond Terminal
The new-tab menu lets you pick **Terminal**, **Claude**, **Diff**, or **Web browser** as the panel type. They're all tabs — you can mix them in the same pane and switch between them with the shortcuts above.

Splitting panes

Tabs share screen space. To see two things at once, split the pane.

Action macOS Linux / Windows
Split right ⌘D Ctrl+D
Split down ⌘⇧D Ctrl+Shift+D

A new split inherits the workspace's default directory and starts with an empty terminal tab. Each pane has its own tab bar, so a pane on the right can host the diff viewer while the pane on the left runs claude.

Move focus between panes

Use the directional shortcuts — they walk the split tree, so ⌘⌥→ from a deeply nested pane still lands on the visually adjacent one.

Action macOS Linux / Windows
Focus left ⌘⌥← Ctrl+Alt+←
Focus right ⌘⌥→ Ctrl+Alt+→
Focus up ⌘⌥↑ Ctrl+Alt+↑
Focus down ⌘⌥↓ Ctrl+Alt+↓

Resize and equalize

Drag the divider between panes for fine control, or use the keyboard.

Action macOS Linux / Windows
Resize left ⌘⌃⇧← Ctrl+Alt+Shift+←
Resize right ⌘⌃⇧→ Ctrl+Alt+Shift+→
Resize up ⌘⌃⇧↑ Ctrl+Alt+Shift+↑
Resize down ⌘⌃⇧↓ Ctrl+Alt+Shift+↓
Equalize splits ⌘⌥= Ctrl+Alt+=

Equalize is the fastest way to reset a layout that's drifted toward unusable extremes.

Clear the screen

⌘K clears the current pane's terminal, the same way most native terminals do. The shell process keeps running; only the visible buffer is wiped.

Action macOS Linux / Windows
Clear screen ⌘K Ctrl+K

Tabs survive everything

Closing a tab kills its tmux session. Closing the browser, refreshing, or losing the network does not — every tab keeps running on the server. Reopen and the same panes, splits, and tabs come back.

For the recovery story across server reboots, see Save & restore layouts.

What's next