tmux/Q/What does it mean to zoom a tmux pane, and how do you zoom out?
What does it mean to "zoom" a tmux pane, and how do you zoom out?
Answer
- AI/Response
- What “zoom” means: In tmux, zoom is a per-window layout toggle on the active pane. The pane is marked zoomed and temporarily expands to use the entire client area for that window; other panes in the same window stay in the layout but are not drawn until you leave zoomed state. Under the hood this is the
resize-pane -Z behavior exposed as the default binding prefix + z (see tmux(1) — default key bindings). - How to zoom out: Press the same key again —
prefix + z toggles zoom on and off for the current pane (same binding as zoom in). There is not a separate “zoom out” chord in the default table; it is one toggle. - Naming note: People coming from vim sometimes say
<leader> z, but in tmux documentation and configs the chord is almost always written as <prefix> z where prefix is your prefix key (often Ctrl-b by default, or whatever you set with set -g prefix). - Verify your session: Run
tmux list-keys and look for resize-pane -Z (or search for z in the prefix table) to confirm nothing in oh-my-tmux or .tmux.conf remapped it. - How to tell you're zoomed
- Visually: The window shows only one pane edge-to-edge; you do not see split borders between sibling panes in that window (other panes still exist in the layout but are not drawn).
#{pane_zoomed}: In status/command formats, #{pane_zoomed} is 1 when that pane is zoomed, 0 otherwise. Quick check from the shell: tmux display-message -p '#{pane_zoomed}' → 1 means the active pane is zoomed.- Optional status hint: Add something like
#{?pane_zoomed,[Z],} to status-left or status-right in .tmux.conf if you want a persistent on-screen flag (see FORMATS in tmux(1)).
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