Show pane in all windows in tmux

Question

I wonder if I can configure a pane in tmux to appear in all windows.

Any hints how to do that?

Answer 1

Of course this is possible, but you would need to run tmux inside a tmux pane.

+-------------+-------------+
| tmux pane 1 | tmux pane 2 |
|             |             |
|             |+-----------+|
|             || new tmux  ||
|             ||  session  ||
|             |+-----------+|
+-------------+-------------+

How to do it:

1. start new tmux session
2. split pane
3. unset TMUX in pane 2 # this allows tmux in tmux
4. start new tmux session in pane
5. repeat 1-3
6. run tmux attach -t <target-session> # this is opens the shared session

This does not work as easily if you are running wrappers for tmux, such as come with oh-my-zsh or tmuxinator. And there are probably many reasons you shouldn't do it, I just don't know any of them.

Answer 2

Here's a way to do this, but the mirrored panes will be read-only. There's the pipe-pane command which sends the pane's output to a command. You can have that command write the output to a file and then from the panes you want to mirror from, you can tail -f that file. Example:

# In source pane
tmux pipe-pane 'cat > /tmp/asdf'

# In the target pane (or another tmux session or terminal window)
tail -f /tmp/asdf