copymode-changes.md

tmux v2.4 introduce a new copymode option... that broke my previous setup

This was introduced in this commit with the note:

Fundamental change to how copy mode key bindings work:

The vi-copy and emacs-copy mode key tables are gone, and instead copy mode commands are bound in one of two normal key tables ("copy-mode" or "copy-mode-vi"). Keys are bound to "send-keys -X copy-mode-command". So:

bind -temacs-copy C-Up scroll-up
bind -temacs-copy -R5 WheelUpPane scroll-up

Becomes:

bind -Tcopy-mode C-Up send -X scroll-up
bind -Tcopy-mode WheelUpPane send -N5 -X scroll-up

This allows the full command parser and command set to be used - for example, we can use the normal command prompt for searching, jumping, and so on instead of a custom one:

bind -Tcopy-mode C-r command-prompt -p'search up' "send -X search-backward '%%'"

command-prompt also gets a -1 option to only require on key press, which is needed for jumping.

The plan is to get rid of mode keys entirely, so more to come eventually.

what changes in my tmux

My previous configuration for copy mode was:

bind-key -t vi-copy v begin-selection
bind-key -t vi-copy y copy-pipe "reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy"

This now becames:

bind-key -Tcopy-mode-vi 'v' send -X begin-selection
bind-key -Tcopy-mode-vi 'y' send -X copy-pipe "reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy"

Bonus

on MacOS Sierra you can drop reattach-to-user-namespace, but make sure you have the Applications in terminal may access clipboard option set when using iTerm2.

bind-key -Tcopy-mode-vi 'v' send -X begin-selection
bind-key -Tcopy-mode-vi 'y' send -X copy-selection