K9s Tmux

The terminal waits, cursor blinking, the cluster thrumming somewhere beyond your screen. You type k9s and the pods slide into view. With Tmux, they never leave.

K9s Tmux is the fastest way to keep Kubernetes insights alive without losing your place. K9s gives you real-time control of your cluster from the terminal. Tmux holds that control in a persistent session, even through disconnects. Together, they create a workflow that is instant, stable, and always ready.

When running K9s inside Tmux, you can detach and reattach at will. No reloading dashboards. No losing context. Your filters, views, and logs stay exactly where you left them. Engineers managing multiple namespaces or staging environments can keep each in its own Tmux window or pane. Switching is instant, with zero overhead.

To set it up, install Tmux on your system. Launch a new Tmux session with:

tmux new -s k9s-session

Run K9s inside that session:

k9s

Detach from the session with Ctrl+b then d. Reattach any time:

tmux attach -t k9s-session

This pairing works well over SSH. If your connection drops, your session continues on the server. Logs will still stream. Graphs still update. You return to the same cursor position you left.

Optimizing K9s for Tmux can include setting Tmux mouse mode for easier resizing, enabling scrollback buffers to review log history, and configuring your .tmux.conf for low-latency key bindings. Combine this with K9s config files to jump directly into the resources that matter.

K9s Tmux is not about more tools. It’s about fewer interruptions. It keeps Kubernetes visible and under control in one terminal workspace, always on and one command away.

See this workflow live in minutes at hoop.dev.