Bash – Screen status bar to display current directory for zsh/bash shell

I think that feature that OP is looking for is called dabbrev-expand in Emacs world:

Expand the word in the buffer before point as a dynamic abbrev, by searching in the buffer for words starting with that abbreviation (v-expand).

xterm also has dabbrev-expand feature but it's a bit less smart than Emacs counterpart but it's very useful to me and one was one of the reasons for which I switched to xterm. Inside xterm window one can use a custom keybinding specified in ~/.Xresources to invoke dabbrev-expand on a given string. For example, I have the following entry in my ~/.Xresources (I use uxterm, an Unicode version of xterm):

UXTerm*VT100.Translations: #override \n\
     Meta <Key>/:dabbrev-expand() \n\

Inside xterm window I can use M-/ (ALT + /) to invoke dabbrev-expand. xterm will look for all strings visible on the screen that start with letters I typed. Example:

$ echo a_very_long_string bye by
$ a_v

If I pressed M-/ now xterm would expand a_v to a_very_long_string. Unfortunately, as I said xterm is not so smart and its dabbrev-expand feature will only work on full strings. So, in your case is would be expanded to issue540 and not issue547314 because issue547314 is a part of origin/issue547314 (think about it as \b in regular expressions, it's a bit similar although most regular expressions engines would catch both occurrences of issue strings in \bissue.+\b). But, you can type or and then pres M-/. xterm will first expand or to origin/v2.1, this is not what we want so press M-/ again and xterm will expand it to origin/issue547314. Now, if you use Bash you can do M-b, C-w and C-e to remove origin/ part. To sum up, dabbrev-expand inside xterm is not as good as in Emacs (and Vim I guess) but it's still faster than rewriting long strings by hand and less typo-prone. And in most cases it will expand directly to the desired string without need to remove redundant parts. You just need to get used to it - look at string you want to have at cursor and see if it's not preceded by something else, and if it is type a preceding part and remove it after expansion.

Note that xterm is not compiled with dabbrev-expand feature by default and you have to enable it explicitly. However, version of xterm in Ubuntu repositories is compiled with dabbrev-expand and you can use it right away.

1. Start tmux as follows:

   (cd /aaa/bbb; tmux)
   

   Now, any new windows (or panes) you create will start in directory /aaa/bbb, regardless of the current directory of the current pane.

2. If you want to change the default directory once tmux is up and running, use attach-session with -c.

   Quoting from the tmux man page for attach-session:

   -c will set the session working directory (used for new windows)
   to working-directory.
   

   For example:

   • Ctrl+b :

   • attach -c /ddd/eee

   New windows (or panes) will now start in directory /ddd/eee, regardless of the directory of the current pane.