Temporarily zooming panes in tmux
Obsolete!
The solution in this article was made obsolete by tmux version 1.8, which
provides native support for zooming panes through the resize-pane -Z command.
Problem
In my wmii configuration, I often use the “client zoom” feature where a group of selected clients (or just the currently focused client if there is no selection) is zoomed onto a temporary view. This allows me to focus on the task at hand while also giving more space to the client(s) that are relevant to that task.
Approach
I ported that feature to tmux this evening, as shown below, by enhancing an existing snippet, which was written by an anonymous user known only as “akshay”, in the following ways:
Use built-in POSIX sh(1) string manipulation functions instead of running sed(1), cut(1), etc. through process substitution.
Reduce resource consumption by running a simple read-loop, as opposed to a complete interactive shell, in the zoomed pane’s placeholder.
Travel to an already zoomed pane by invoking this feature on the zoomed pane’s placeholder.
Allow the vertical bar delimiter (
|) used in this feature to occur naturally in window names.
Solution
bind -n M-m run 'set -e; \
new_ip=$(tmux display-message -p "#I|#P"); \
if ! tmux select-window -t "*$new_ip"; then \
old_wip=$(tmux display-message -p "#W"); \
old_w=${old_wip%|[0-9]*|[0-9]*}; \
if test "$old_w" != "$old_wip"; then \
old_i=${old_wip%|*}; old_i=${old_i##*|}; \
old_p=${old_wip##*|}; \
cur_i=$(tmux display-message -p "#I"); \
cur_p=$(tmux display-message -p "#P"); \
tmux select-window -t ":$old_i"; \
tmux select-pane -t ":$old_i.$old_p"; \
tmux swap-pane -s ":$cur_i.$cur_p"; \
if test "$(tmux list-panes -t ":$cur_i" | wc -l)" -le 1; then \
tmux kill-window -t ":$cur_i"; \
fi; \
else \
new_wip="$old_wip|$new_ip"; \
tmux new-window -d -n "$new_wip" "sh -c \" \
trap : INT QUIT; \
while :; do \
echo PLACEHOLDER; \
cat > /dev/null; \
done \
\""; \
tmux swap-pane -s "$new_wip"; \
tmux select-window -t "$new_wip"; \
fi; \
fi; \
'