Modes

Like vim, replay mode is modal. It has several different modes that influence both what is shown on the screen and what you can do:

• Time mode: allows you to pause, play, and move through the history of the current pane back to when it first began.
• Copy mode: allows you to explore the state of the screen at a particular point in time. This includes the scrollback buffer, which is traditionally all that tmux's copy mode gave you access to.
  • Visual mode: This is a submode of copy mode that permits you to select text and copy it into your user-specific copy buffer that can then be pasted elsewhere.

Time mode

Time mode is similar to a video player: you can pause, play (both forwards and backwards!), and skip through time to inspect particular moments in the history of a pane. While playing back terminal events, time mode skips inactivity, here defined as any idle period longer than a second.

Searching

Time mode also allows you to search through the pane's history using regular expressions or string literals. In this way you can find all instances of a string if it ever appeared on the screen--even if it was subsequently cleared away. Note that this is different from searching in the scrollback. Searching in time mode will find matches that appeared on the screen at any point in time, including in full-screen applications such as vim or htop.

You can initiate a search by hitting / ^[?] to search forward in time and ? ^[?] to search backward (by default).

If the query string you enter is not a valid regex, it will be interpreted as a string literal.

The search bar also supports time expressions, which you can use to jump by a fixed amount of time. Time expressions are in the format NdNhNmNs where N is the number of that unit that you wish to move by. You will move in time in the direction of your search.

Some examples:

1h30s # one hour 30 seconds
3d # three days

Copy mode

To enter copy mode, all you need to do is invoke any action that would cause the cursor or the viewport to move. Like tmux's copy mode, you can explore the state of the screen and copy text to be pasted elsewhere. Copy mode supports a wide range of cursor and viewport movements that should feel familiar to users of CLI text editors such as vim. For a full list of supported motions, refer to the reference page for key bindings.

Copy mode also allows you to swap between the terminal's main and alt screens using s ^[?]. In other words, even if you run a full-screen application such as htop, you can still swap back to the scrollback buffer and see the output of commands you ran before running htop.

Visual mode

Visual mode is initiated when you press v ^[?] (by default). It works almost exactly like vim's visual mode does; after you have some selected some text, you can yank it into your buffer with y ^[?] and paste it elsewhere with ctrl+a P ^[?].