Prevent pane/window from closing when command completes – tmux

tmux

In my tmux.conf file I have it configured to open windows, name them, setup panes etc.. etc..

However one issue I have is that if one of the panes launches a command, let's say ls, then the pane closes itself after the command completes (instantly). Is there any way to prevent this behavior? Or have it drop to a normal shell after a command completes?

I am assuming that I need to start a shell -> execute command when the pane launches, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how. I have googled a bit for this problem but have come up short.

Best Answer

You have a couple of options.

Instead of running ls in your window, run a shell, then send the shell keystrokes to execute:

tmux start-server  
tmux new-session -d -s session  
tmux new-window -t session:1  
tmux send-keys -t session:1 ls C-m

You can lunch a sequence of commands in such a way as to leave yourself with a bash shell after your other commands have run:
```
tmux start-server  
tmux new-session -d
tmux new-window 'ls;bash -i'
```
See jasonwryan's answer for details on the remain-on-exit option to keep panes alive after their process has exited so you can review the output.
If the output of some command was worth seeing once, it might be worth refreshing. If you are monitoring the output of something you can watch to periodically get new output. This should play nicely with panes in tmux:
```
tmux start-server  
tmux new-session -d
tmux new-window 'watch -n 60 ls'
```

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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, change window pane by mouse click

As of tmux 2.1, you can enable this by adding it to your .tmux.conf: set -g mouse on

Mouse-mode has been rewritten. There's now no longer options for:

mouse-resize-pane

mouse-select-pane

mouse-select-window

mode-mouse

Instead there is just one option: 'mouse' which turns on mouse support entirely.

See the mouse-select-pane option in man tmux:

mouse-select-pane [on | off]
If on, tmux captures the mouse and when a window is split into multiple panes the mouse may be used to select the current pane. The mouse click is also passed through to the application as normal.

You can enable this by adding it to your .tmux.conf: set -g mouse-select-pane on

Best Answer

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Tmux – Moving Pane to Window

Tmux, change window pane by mouse click

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