How to hide a tmux pane

tmux

I have 3 panes in my tmux window:

--------------------------
|             |      2   |
|             |          |
|        1    |----------|
|             |      3   |
|             |          |
--------------------------

Panes 1 and 2 have vim. Pane 3 runs a cli I am developing. Sometimes I want to compare panes 1 and 2, so I want to hide pane 3:

--------------------------
|             |          |
|             |          |
|        1    |       2  |
|             |          |
|             |          |
--------------------------

and then bring back pane 3 again. I don't want to kill pane 3 as I have set up some things there and don't want to go though setting them up again.

  • Is there something similar to PREFIX + z which can zoom pane 2 but without touching pane 1? Or
  • Is there a way to hide pane 3 quickly and bring it up back when needed?

Best Answer

Use the break-pane and join-pane commands. Refer to man tmux for details, options and usage.

Hide Pane 3:

Select pane 3 and enter Prefix-:break-pane -dP.

tmux will send pane 3 to a window in the background (the -d flag) and print some information about it in pane 2 (the -P flag). By default you'll see something like 1:2.0 (meaning: session:window.pane). Hit q to continue working.1

1With some practice you will be able to drop the -P flag since you can predict the session:window.pane triplet: session defaults to the current session and pane defaults to 0 while window will be the next free window identifier.

Get Pane 3 back:

To get pane 3 and the layout back, select pane 2 and issue Prefix-:join-pane -vs 1:2.0 telling tmux to split pane 2 vertically (-v) and to join the (source) pane (-s) with identifier 1:2.0. Optionally, you can drop either the session or the pane identifier. Note also that tmux stores a command line history, conveniently accessible with Prefix-:-Up or Prefix-:-ctrl-p.

You'll probably need some time to get the hang of it, but once you do, you'll surely be able to come up with custom key bindings that are convenient for you.

This question contains some useful information and tricks that might improve your workflow.

Related Question