Tmux, a terminal multiplexer that enables users to manage multiple sessions, windows, and panes within a single terminal window, has just released version 3.7.
The release’s highlight is floating panes, which appear above the standard tiled layout and resemble popups. Unlike popups, however, floating panes are not modal and function like regular panes, including support for escape sequences.
By default, users can open a floating pane by pressing tmux’s prefix key, C-b, followed by *; alternatively, floating panes can be created with the new new-pane command.
This feature is still in its early stages. Currently, floating panes can only be moved and resized with the mouse. Actions such as swapping floating panes, resizing them with resize-pane, converting between floating and tiled states, and restoring custom layouts with floating panes are not yet supported.
Tmux 3.7 also introduces line number support in copy mode. The new copy-mode-line-numbers option allows users to select from several modes: off, default, absolute, relative, and hybrid.
Moreover, the new focus-follows-mouse option enables pane focus to follow the mouse pointer, and the clipboard handling is improved with the new get-clipboard option. When enabled, tmux can request clipboard content from the terminal and forward it to a pane.
Tmux 3.7 also introduces several enhancements to controls and mouse handling. New mouse ranges, control0 through control9, provide mouse controls in the pane state line. The default second status line, when status-format is set to 2, now displays a list of panes.
The list-keys command now supports sorting with the -O flag and custom formatting using -F. SIXEL image handling has also improved, with the maximum number of images increased to 20 and size-calculation issues resolved.
Finally, security has been enhanced through stricter sanitization of pane titles, window names, and session names, along with several fixes identified by fuzz testing.
For additional information, see the announcement or refer to the full changelog.
