Tmux Popup Windows

A simple and neat feature of tmux is popup windows! I only discovered them recently. They’re just floating windows that open above the regular windows and panes. Once opened, it takes focus, so you cannot interact in the panes or windows below. Switching windows is also not possible until a popup window exists. These are meant for quick tasks, like for example opening an mpd client to run a command,close the window (by hitting q) and go on with whatever you’ve been doing.

This example use case was my first popup window binding in tmux. The -E flag executes a shell-command here.

bind m display-popup \
  -E "if [[ ! $(pidof mpd) ]]; then mpd && ncmpcpp; else ncmpcpp; fi"