As we push the limits of tmux further and further you are bound to end up in a situation where you are mashing down a hotkey and it's just not doing what you want it to do, and you have no idea why.

show-messages is a tmux command that can be used to show what tmux is actually doing behind the scenes. This might highlight any hot key conflicts you might have in your ~/.tmux.conf.

man page for show-messages

In case you wnat more information about show-messages, here is the man page.


show-messages [-JT] [-t target-client]
            (alias: showmsgs)

        Show server messages or information.  Messages are stored, up to a
        maximum of the limit set by the message-limit server option.  -J and -T
        show debugging information about jobs and terminals.

tmux-nav-2021

for more information on how I navigate tmux, check out this full post

Also check out the full YouTube tmux-playlist to see all of the videos in this series.