Why the cheat sheet forgets

A binding you press doesn’t need a cheat sheet. The one you open prefix ? to search for does, because you looked it up instead of pressing it and that’s the only signal the tool gets about what you haven’t learned yet, or have forgotten. So the sheet isn’t a score of what you use. It’s the list of keys you still search for.

Looked up, then learned

Each pick in the key search goes into the usage log with its time. A binding looked up in the last 14 days ([usage] learned_after_days) sits at the top of its box with a ▸ and its count, most lookups first. After 14 days without a lookup it drops off the sheet and the line under the sheet counts it as learned. Looking it up again brings it back. With the days set to 0 nothing is ever learned.

A log written before picks carried a time has counts and no dates. Those bindings count as learned, since a count with no date says nothing about this week. The next lookup puts a date on them.

Three boxes and one more

Your own bindings, the ones noted companion: , fill three boxes by the word after the prefix: panes, windows, sessions and projects in one, copy mode, opening and searching in the next, and config, help and anything else in the third. The ones you never looked up follow the marked ones in alphabetical order. The fourth box holds tmux’s own bindings and the ones plugins add, but only those you’ve looked up. tmux ships about a hundred noted defaults and listing them all is the man page again. A default shows tmux’s note and a plugin key bound with no note shows its command.

What gets recorded

Nothing, until [usage] enabled = true. With it off the sheet lists your bindings unranked, the fourth box stays empty and one line says it learns only with the log on. With it on each pick writes one line to $XDG_STATE_HOME/tmux-companion/keys-usage.tsv with the key table, the key and the time, as prefix % @1790000000. It’s a plain file on your machine that nothing else reads. Past five thousand lines it’s rewritten as one line per binding with the count and the first and last time.