How to copy and paste in tmux

Copy mode → select → copy → paste:

keysprefix + [ · Space · Enter · ]

The keyboard flow

prefix [ enters copy mode. Move to the start of what you want, press Space to start selecting, move to the end, press Enter to copy and exit. prefix ] pastes. With vi mode-keys, v and y can be bound to match vim:

~/.tmux.conf
setw -g mode-keys vi
bind -T copy-mode-vi v send -X begin-selection
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send -X copy-selection-and-cancel

The catch: tmux has its own clipboard

Copying in tmux lands in a tmux paste buffer, not your system clipboard — prefix ] pastes it, but Cmd-V won't see it. Getting them to sync is its own topic: see the system clipboard page for the per-OS setup (it's the #1 tmux complaint of all time).

Buffer history

Every copy is kept: prefix = opens a picker of all previous copies — a built-in clipboard manager almost nobody knows about.

Related

Verified against tmux 3.6 · updated July 2026 · back to the full cheat sheet

[tmuxlab]
^B