tmux/Pane/Q/What's the easiest way to bind a key that copies a pane's CWD to the clipboard or displays it?

• What's the easiest way to bind a key that copies a tmux/Pane's CWD to the clipboard, or displays it?

  • AI Answer

    • Short answer: put a bind-key line in [[.tmux.conf.local]] that pipes #{pane_current_path} through pbcopy; chain a display-message onto it with \; for on-screen confirmation, or use display-message alone to just show it.

    • Copy silently to the clipboard

      • bind-key y run-shell "printf '%s' '#{pane_current_path}' | pbcopy"

      • run-shell expands #{...} format variables itself before handing the string to /bin/sh, so there's no need to nest a tmux display-message -p call inside it.
      • Use printf '%s', not echo -n — verified live: macOS's /bin/sh (bash in POSIX mode) doesn't treat -n as a flag there, so echo -n '...' | pbcopy copies the literal string -n /path/... instead of the path.

    • Copy and show a confirmation

      • bind-key y run-shell "printf '%s' '#{pane_current_path}' | pbcopy" \; display-message "copied #{pane_current_path}"

      • \; chains a second tmux command onto the same binding — confirmed this registers as one atomic binding by loading it via tmux source-file and checking list-keys. Typing an unescaped ; straight at a shell prompt to tmux bind-key ... does not chain the same way, since the shell strips the backslash first and tmux then treats it as two separate top-level commands; this only matters when testing from a shell prompt instead of a config file.

    • Just display it, no clipboard

      • bind-key Y display-message "#{pane_current_path}"

      • No run-shell needed — display-message alone already substitutes #{pane_current_path} and prints it to the status line for display-time milliseconds.
    • Add whichever binding to the managed tmux config and reload with tmux source-file ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf. (Correction: my oh-my-tmux / .tmux.conf.local advice above no longer matches this machine — the dotfiles repo removed oh-my-tmux and manages ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf directly via chezmoi now.)
    • Tracked as a feature request: codekiln/dotfiles#114 — pick the actual key and land it in the managed tmux.conf.

    • Sources

      • tmux(1) man page — bind-key, run-shell, display-message, PARSING SYNTAX