How to increase the scrollback buffer in tmux
More scrollback (takes effect for new panes only):
The gotcha everyone hits
history-limit is read when a pane is created — setting it does nothing for panes that already exist. Put it in .tmux.conf, restart or open new panes, done. This detail is the accepted answer on the single most-viewed tmux question on Stack Overflow.
Don't set it to a million
Scrollback is kept in RAM per pane; 50k lines is a sane ceiling for heavy use. If you need everything forever, log with pipe-pane to a file instead.
Related
Verified against tmux 3.6 · updated July 2026 · back to the full cheat sheet