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.

Await mServer.sessions, then read mSession.windows and mWindow.panes from the loaded graph.

session.windows and window.panes read the graph loaded by await server.sessions() without additional tmux commands.

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 returns a ISelection from the session’s captured graph. Reading it does not issue another tmux command; refresh the snapshot when you need newer state.

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 are getters that follow the relationships in the loaded graph.

One walk, down and back up¶

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

const session = (await server.sessions())[0];
const window = session.windows[0];
const pane = window.panes[0];

pane.window.id === window.id;
window.session.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:

Read the mSession.activeWindow and mWindow.activePane getters.

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:

Selection<T> is iterable. Iterate and compare IDs, or spread it into an array for standard array operations.

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 the handles’ id properties when checking identity on the same server.