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.

mserver.attached_sessions() lists only sessions with an attached client.

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.

msession.Session.panes performs a live listing and returns a Result from the async call. Handle a command failure before using the returned panes.

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:

mPane.window and mWindow.session asynchronously return Result<Option<Window>, Error> and Result<Option<Session>, Error>. Handle both a command failure and an absent parent.

Handle both a command failure and an absent parent in the optional result.

One walk, down and back up¶

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

let sessions = server.sessions().await?;
let session = &sessions[0];
let windows = session.windows().await?;
let window = &windows[0];

let back = window.session().await?; // Result<Option<Session>, Error>
back.is_some_and(|s| s.id() == 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:

mSession.active_window and mWindow.active_pane asynchronously return Result<Option<Window>, Error> and Result<Option<Pane>, Error>. Handle errors and the absence of an active object.

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:

Iterate over the vector and compare each object’s id(). Confirm the objects belong to the same server before comparing IDs.

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 mPane.id values when checking identity on the same server.