📅 2013-Jan-21 ⬩ ✍️ Ashwin Nanjappa ⬩ 🏷️ byobu, keyboard shortcuts ⬩ 📚 Archive
Byobu is a program that makes using terminal multiplexers really easy. A terminal multiplexer is like a windowing system for console programs. Byobu uses tmux by default, but can be configured to use GNU screen too.
Byobu allows you have many console windows or programs running at the same time. You can detach from Byobu and later restore the session, with all your terminals and programs running intact. This is similar to hibernating and restarting an OS back.
When opened, Byobu opens with your default shell. The bottom line of Byobu is like a taskbar and shows currently open windows (or tabs). You can see the default window (or tab) numbered 0 there.
To open a new session named foo, use the command:
byobu -S foo
Byobu uses the function keys for almost all its operations.
F2: Open a new window or tab. This means that a new
shell session is opened in that window. This window is numbered 1, as
seen at the bottom. Every invocation of F2 creates a new
window, numbered with the smallest unused integer.
F3 or F4: Switch to the window that is
left or right of the current one.
F6: Detach from Byobu. Puts you back at the shell.
All the windows and the shells inside them are still running. You get
back to them whenever you want by running byobu
again.
F7: Toggle mode to scroll through history. Hit
Enter to get out of this mode. This mode is useful for
search and copy-paste, see below.
Alt + PgUp or Alt + PgDn: Page up or
down through history of current window.
F8: Rename the current window. The new name is shown
at the bottom of each window.
Ctrl + F2: Create a vertical split window.
Shift + F2: Create a horizontal split
window.
Shift + F3 or Shift + F4: Cycle forward
or backward between split windows.
Shift + F11: Toggle between maximizing (or full
screen) the current split and restoring it back among the
splits.
F9: Change Byobu settings using its inbuilt Curses
GUI dialog.
Alt + F12: Toggle mouse support. More details in
this post.
Shift + F12: Toggle function keys. This is useful
when you want to use the function keys in a terminal application running
inside Byobu.
F1: View help, including keyboard shortcuts like
these.
You can also see these keyboard shortcuts defined in the
/usr/share/byobu/keybindings/f-keys.tmux file.
Search text: Go to F7 mode. Type
/foobar or ?foobar just like in Vim to search
forward and backward through the shell output. Press Enter
to exit the mode.
Copy-paste text: Go to F7 mode,
move the cursor to the start of the text to be copied. Press
Space followed by arrow keys to visually mark the text to
copy. Press Enter to end the copy operation and exit the
mode. To paste, for example at the shell, press
Alt + Ins.
Tried with: Byobu 5.133 and Ubuntu 20.04