Possible option to hide a session?

[blmarket]

TLDR

I'm looking for a way to hide a session from being attached by normal clients, to meet below goal.

Context

I'm building web viewer of tmux session, which connects to tmux as control
client and proxy the content to xterm.js web viewer.

Goal

I want a specific dimension setup - let's say web client has 100x69 dimension and desktop has
have 121x32. What I wanted to see was:

• Window not displayed - I don't care
• Window displayed by web viewer, but not by desktop: 100x69
• Window displayed by desktop, but not by web viewer: 121x32
• Window displayed by both web & desktop: 100x32

The problem

I'm trying to create a session for web viewer and setup winlinks + set window-size smallest. So far it worked as intended, but other desktop clients may attach to that session. Looking for a way to hide this session from being attached with tmux attach command. (e.g. create a server option to skip named sessions for tmux attach command)

Alternatives I've tried

I also tried to keep 1 session but use web viewer to show arbitrary window. Current window-size options (latest, smallest, largest, manual) did not work well for all the use cases.

Application demo

Just for fun, here's a screenshot of what I'm doing...

[nicm]

Can't the control client set the size with refresh-client -C and then use window-size manual?

[blmarket]

With window-size manual, if the control client attaches first then desktop client attaches later, control client need to detect that and adjust the window size to accommodate both - otherwise screen size will be kept 100x69

[nicm]

Doesn't it get a notification when a client attaches to the session telling it to do that?

I'm just concerned this is such a narrow use case I would rather if some existing mechanim can be used for it, or extended to do it, instead of adding a new "ignore sessions" option that only you will ever use.

[blmarket]

Thanks for sharing your opinion on this. I agree my ask is too niche for general users. Still one argument I want to make is tmux attach with current algorithm(cmd_find_session_better) is difficult to play with multiple sessions (as there's no clear control on activity time), but I admit my use case is already unusual and not intended to be supported.

Happy to take it back and work with suggested workarounds, but hope session selection can be reconsidered when there are good needs.

[nicm]

Hmm I'm not really sure what the best idea is. You could write your own attach script which skipped the sessions you want to ignore easily enough. Or maybe when the control client sees another client attaching it could just change that client's session (not sure if that is possible right now).

We could add a -O sort order flag or a filter format option to attach-session but both of those will need you to use different attach arguments and if you need to do that you may as well write a script to do it exactly how you want.

Instead of a server option I'd probably add a session option no-attach which if on means the session won't be selected for attach, but like I said I'm not sure anyone else would use it.

[blmarket]

Haha, shell alias ta='tmux attach -t 0' might work as well, at least for me.

Just thought about making this web viewer to be standalone OSS project other people can use - and was trying to hide the quirks.

[blmarket]

Closing as I'm going with alternative option suggested in the comment