This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

tmux: error monitoring panes

Page created: 2025-04-06

Back to: tmux

In a current project, I’ve got tmux set up with a two-pane solution for viewing errors. Here’s what it looks like and which shortcuts I use.

    +==================+
    |                  |
    |                  |
    |                  |
    |   Editing pane   |
    |                  |
    |                  |
    |                  |
    |------------------|
    |   Error pane     |
    +==================+

The error pane is just a sliver at the bottom, but it’s enough to see changes happen and view the error.

Here’s what I’m running in the error pane to watch errors from the local OpenBSD httpd web server:

tail -f /var/www/logs/error.log

tmux shortcuts (note that the default leader sequence is Ctrl-b):

<leader> " Split window into top/bottom panes
<leader> Up/Down Move focus to the editing or error pane
<leader> Alt-Up/Alt-Down Make the focused error pane bigger/smaller
<leader> [ Enter tmux "copy mode" with the error pane focused to scroll around in it to read the relevant part of the error
Esc Exit "copy mode" in error pane to allow it to scroll naturally