How to enable mouse mode in tmux
One line — scrolling, pane clicking, and border dragging all work:
What you get
Wheel scrolls the pane under the cursor, clicking focuses a pane, dragging borders resizes, drag-select copies into the tmux buffer, and right-click opens context menus (tmux ≥ 3.0). One old-guide warning: mode-mouse / mouse-select-pane options are from pre-2.1 tmux — if you see them, the guide is a decade old. It's just mouse now.
The selection trade-off
With the mouse on, tmux owns selection: copies go to tmux buffers (add set -g set-clipboard on to sync the system clipboard), and selection correctly stays inside one pane. Hold Shift to bypass tmux and get raw terminal selection — useful, but it'll grab text across pane borders since the terminal can't see them.
Middle-click paste
X11 users: middle-click pastes the tmux buffer by default with mouse on. If you want it to paste the X primary selection instead, that needs a custom binding — search the cheat sheet for paste-buffer.
Related
Verified against tmux 3.6 · updated July 2026 · back to the full cheat sheet