Traversal

Use relationships to move between sessions, windows, and panes. Server, session, window, pane explains the hierarchy and snapshot model. This page covers relationship calls, collection membership, and object identity.

Down the hierarchy¶

List children through the parent object or a captured snapshot. Whether a read issues another tmux command depends on the API, independently of whether the call is async; see Server, session, window, pane.

Use mServer.sessions, mSession.windows, and mWindow.panes to read each level of the hierarchy.

All panes in a session¶

Use a session-wide pane collection when the task spans several windows, such as finding a command or capturing output from every pane. A window linked to multiple sessions still refers to the same tmux panes. Check whether the API reads live state or traverses a captured graph before reusing its result.

Java has no direct session-wide pane member. Traverse mSession.windows() and then mWindow.panes() in the captured relations. Deduplicate pane IDs when combining results from sessions that may share linked windows.

Up the hierarchy¶

Parent lookups may read captured data or query tmux again. Check the method’s read and failure semantics; Server, session, window, pane introduces that distinction:

Call mPane.window and mWindow.session to find an object’s parent.

One walk, down and back up¶

List a session’s windows, then look up a parent and compare its identity with the starting object:

Session session = server.sessions().get(0);
Window window = session.windows().get(0);

Session back = window.session();
back.equals(session);

The active child¶

The active window and pane identify where untargeted input goes. Use their accessors or inspect the active flags in a captured snapshot:

mSession.activeWindow returns Optional<Window>, and mWindow.activePane returns Optional<Pane>.

Format-token fields describes the underlying #window_active and #pane_active fields.

Is it in that collection?¶

Checking membership generally goes through whatever your language uses for collection membership, since most of these calls already return an ordinary array, slice, or list:

Use standard collection membership operations with the object identity comparison described below.

Is this the same object?¶

Compare IDs to determine whether two handles refer to the same tmux object on the same server. Check what handle equality includes before using it as an identity test:

mPane.equals compares the server identity and pane ID.