Mirroring a pane between two windows

tmux

Is it possible to have the same pane appear in two different windows of a single tmux session?

I typically have a single horizontal split in my main window with vim in the top pane (about 80-90% of the terminal height), and a command line in the bottom pane where I run the program I'm working on. Because the bottom window is so small, I often can't see error output, and using tmux's keyboard shortcuts to scroll back is getting tiresome. I'd like to have my second window attach to the same pane so that if I need to see more of my error output, I can just quickly switch to the second window without needing to deal with scrollback. Is this possible?

(I guess one fallback would be to use something like tee to write stdout to a log file and tail that in my second window. I'm hoping that's not necessary though)

Best Answer

By default, you can toggle a pane's "zoom state" by pressing Prefix and z (the default prefix is Ctrl+B).

This will make the current pane (your command line pane, for example) occupy the whole window. Press Prefix and z again to "unzoom" the pane.

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

TMUX Shared Session – Different Cursors for Different Users

This question is a bit old, but I was looking for something similar, and found it here. It creates a second session that shares windows with the first, but has its own view and cursor.

tmux new-session -s alice
tmux new-session -t alice -s bob

If the sharing is happening between two user accounts, you may still have to mess with permissions (which it sounds like you had working already).

Edit: As suggested, a quote from another answer:

First, add a group for tmux users

export TMUX_GROUP=tmux
addgroup $TMUX_GROUP

Create a directory with the group set to $TMUX_GROUP and use the setgid bit so that files created within the directory automatically have the group set to $TMUX_GROUP.

mkdir /var/tmux
chgrp $TMUX_GROUP /var/tmux
chmod g+ws /var/tmux

Next make sure the users that want to share the session are members of $TMUX_GROUP

usermod -aG $TMUX_GROUP user1
usermod -aG $TMUX_GROUP user2

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tmux – Moving Pane to Window

TMUX Shared Session – Different Cursors for Different Users

Related Question