Keep a "sidebar pane" visible while zooming another pane

[raine]

Hi, I maintain a tmux-related agent workflow tool, which uses a regular tmux pane as a sidebar. I understand this is a bit of an unorthodox use of tmux panes, but it’s quite useful in practice.

A user asked whether the sidebar could stay visible when zooming another pane. The desired layout would be:

Normal:                 Zoomed:
+---------+----------+  +---------+----------+
| sidebar | agent A  |  | sidebar |          |
|         +----------+  |         | agent A  |
|         | agent B  |  |         |          |
+---------+----------+  +---------+----------+

Unzooming would restore the original agent layout.

Native zoom currently hides the sidebar too. Is there any conceivable existing or planned future feature that might help with this?

Original request: raine/workmux#320

[nicm]

You'd have to do it yourself by moving all the panes you didn't want to a temporary session.

You can use newp -A to keep a floating pane above zoom but that will still cover part of the zoomed pane.

There has been talk of revamping layouts part of which would probably allow things like this but it won't be soon.

[nicm]

You might look at #5468 as well.