What kind of regular expressions does tmux use for searching?

[andreihh]

According to the manpage:

The search commands come in several varieties: ‘search-forward’ and ‘search-backward’ search for a regular expression;

However, I did not find anywhere what kind of regular expressions are used. For example, POSIX character classes (e.g., [:alpha:], [:space:]) don't seem supported, whereas some Perl character classes (e.g., \w) are supported.

What particular regex implementation does tmux use? Would it be possible to document this in the manpage?

Edit: on a closer look, it seems POSIX character classes are supported!

Thanks!

[nicm]

It uses regexec(3) with REG_EXTENDED, so EREs.

[andreihh]

Great, thank you for the quick reply!