How to move and reorder windows in tmux

Move the current window to index 2, or swap two windows:

Close the gaps

After killing windows you're left with 0, 1, 4, 7. move-window -r renumbers everything sequentially, and this setting does it automatically forever:

~/.tmux.conf
set -g renumber-windows on

Drag-style reordering

Bind Shift+arrow to bubble the current window left or right:

~/.tmux.conf
bind -r "<" swap-window -d -t -1
bind -r ">" swap-window -d -t +1

Related

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

[tmuxlab]
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