How can I efficiently reorder windows in tmux? For example, having this set of windows:
0:zsh 1:elinks 2:mutt 3:irssi 4:emacs 5:rss 6:htop What would I have to do to move rss to between elinks and mutt, ending up with:
0:zsh 1:elinks 2:rss 3:mutt 4:irssi 5:emacs 6:htop I know how to use move-window to move a window to a yet-unused index, and I could use a series of them to achieve this—but, obviously, this is very tedious.
swap-window can help you:
swap-window -t -1 It moves current window to the left by one position.
From man tmux:
swap-window [-d] [-s src-window] [-t dst-window] (alias: swapw) This is similar to link-window, except the source and destination windows are swapped. It is an error if no window exists at src-window. You can bind it to a key:
bind-key -n S-Left swap-window -t -1 bind-key -n S-Right swap-window -t +1 Then you can use Shift+Left and Shift+Right to change current window position.
swap-window commands (three for the example case)—correct? swap-window -s 2 -t 5. This swap window number 2 with window number 5. swap-window command, but didn’t know about the -/+ prefixes to target the previous/next window. swap-window in newer tmux versions -d option for a more intuitive behavior where you keep focus on the swapped window. E.g. swap-window -d -t -1 The accepted and highly upvoted answer is correct, though behavior in recent tmux versions sees the swap-window command not keep you on the same window. So it works rather unintuitively, your active window will get swapped in that direction but you will stay put in the same slot!
To fix that issue, simply augment the bind to follow it. For example from my tmux config:
bind -n C-S-Left { swap-window -t -1; previous-window } bind -n C-S-Right { swap-window -t +1; next-window } 
-d to restore the old intuitive behavior. E.g. swap-window -d -t -1. Source: github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1879 There is this display-menu feature in changes from v2.9 to v3.0.
In Tmux, you can now use (Prefix) < to trigger a floating box, where you can control to swap the current window with others as below.
Remarks:
I accidentally stumbled upon the shortcut of using (Prefix) < to trigger a floating box, where you can control to swap the current window with others.
Not sure if it is a new feature since I couldn't find it in any documentation while having all plugins disabled. But it helped me to reorder the windows.
Thank you for quoting the documentation by @KamilMaciorowski
Here is a working solution wrapped in bash function.
list=$(tmux lsw -F '#I'); # for shift left, could be moved inside function list=$(tmux lsw -F '#I'); list=$(echo $list|rev); # for shift right, list reversed shift_tmux_window_range() { # depend on `list` local started=0 beg=$1 end=$2 for i in $list; do if (($i == $beg)); then started=1; h=$beg; tmux linkw -s $beg && tmux unlinkw -t $beg; elif (($i == $end)); then tmux movew -d -s $i -t $h; tmux movew -d -t $end; break; elif [ $started = 1 ]; then tmux movew -d -s $i -t $h; h=$i; fi; done } shift_tmux_window_range 5 2 Bonus: stay in the same window if current active window not affected.
If tmux is version 1.7 or higher
move-window -r or
set-option -g renumber-windows on in .tmux.conf for automatically doing, in future.
