How do I undo a rebind in tmux?

Question

In other words, how do get back a default behavior?

I used this config (from the book tmux - Productive Mouse-Free Development):

# Maximize and restore a pane
unbind Up
bind Up new-window -d -n tmp \; swap-pane -s tmp.1 \; select-window -t tmp
unbind Down
bind Down last-window \; swap-pane -s tmp.1 \; kill-window -t tmp

As the comment says, you bind the PREFIX+Up key to a 'maximize' action and the PREFIX+Down key to a 'restore' action. This is really cool and I like it, but after trying it out for a while I'd like to go back to using Up and Down to move around panes.

Simply removing the lines from the .tmux.conf file and reloading did not get PREFIX+Up and PREFIX+Down back to their default behavior. How can I get PREFIX+Up and PREFIX+Down to move between panes again?

Answer 1

There is no way direct way to restore a binding to its default other than just doing it explicitly.

These are the default bindings:

bind-key -r      Up select-pane -U
bind-key -r    Down select-pane -D

Paste them into some file (e.g. /tmp/default-up-down) and source it into your server. You can automate it a bit by extracting the bindings from a fresh, evanescent server:

# extract some default bindings from a fresh server
tmux -f /dev/null -L temp start-server\; list-keys | grep -E ' (Up|Down)' >/tmp/default-up-down

# make sure you got the bindings you wanted
cat /tmp/default-up-down

# apply the bindings to your normal server
tmux source /tmp/default-up-down

Note: The output of list-keys is generally directly usable, but you may have to massage it a bit if you have bindings that involve complicated quoting or you are binding special keys like ; (which usually acts as a tmux command separator, so it needs to be escaped with a backslash). Though, the default bindings of Up and Down should not pose any such problems.