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.

Read pServer.sessions, then pSession.windows and pWindow.panes to traverse from the server down to its panes.

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.

plibtmux.Session.panes runs a session-scoped $list-panes -s read. Use it to list panes across the session’s windows without manually listing each window.

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:

Read pPane.window for a pane’s window and pWindow.session for a window’s session.

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 = server.sessions[0]
window = session.windows[0]
pane = window.panes[0]

pane.window.window_id == window.window_id
window.session.session_id == session.session_id

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:

Read pSession.active_window and pWindow.active_pane for the selected objects.

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:

CQueryList supports in: use window in session.windows or pane in window.panes.

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:

Compare aWindow.window_id or aPane.pane_id when checking whether two handles name the same object on the same server.