How to switch directly to a pane in Tmux

tmux

I'd like to switch directly to a pane in Tmux, by pane #.

How can I do this? I know how to cycle between panes, and move to panes that are beside the current pane.

I'd like to be able to run the display-panes command, which shows the "pane #" on each pane, then later on jump directly to a pane using the pane #'s that were displayed by display-panes.

Is this possible?

NOTE: And just to be clear, I don't mean window, I mean pane. Thanks!

Best Answer

You can jump directly to a pane by typing pane's index while it is showed by display-panes command.

From man tmux:

display-panes [-t target-client]
                   (alias: displayp)
             Display a visible indicator of each pane shown by target-client.
             See the display-panes-time, display-panes-colour, and
             display-panes-active-colour session options.  While the indicator
             is on screen, a pane may be selected with the ‘0’ to ‘9’ keys.

Or instead of typing command, you can use:

C-b q

C-b send prefix key
q display panes indexes

Related Solutions

Tmux – Moving Pane to Window

The command to do this is join-pane in tmux 1.4.

join-pane [-dhv] [-l size | -p percentage] [-s src-pane] [-t dst-pane]  
    (alias: joinp)
    Like split-window, but instead of splitting dst-pane and creating
    a new pane, split it and move src-pane into the space.  This can
    be used to reverse break-pane.

To simplify this, I have these binds in my .tmux.conf for that:

# pane movement
bind-key j command-prompt -p "join pane from:"  "join-pane -s '%%'"
bind-key s command-prompt -p "send pane to:"  "join-pane -t '%%'"

The first grabs the pane from the target window and joins it to the current, the second does the reverse.

You can then reload your tmux session by running the following from within the session:

$ tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Make Tmux tell Vim when its pane loses focus

This is probably best done using vim's client-server model. There's some good guidance about using it in :help remote.txt.

Firstly, you'll need a vim client compiled with the +clientserver option. If your distribution doesn't package it this way, get the source (through apt-get source, abs, et al) and add that option.

Once that's done, you'll need to rebind your keys in tmux so that when you change windows it also sends something like the following to the active window:

vim --servername foo --remote-send '<C-\><C-N>:w<CR>'

Something like the following should work (not tested):

bind-key 0 run-shell "vim --servername foo --remote-send '<C-\><C-N>:w<CR>'" \; select-window -t :0

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tmux – Moving Pane to Window

Make Tmux tell Vim when its pane loses focus

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