Tmux Popup Windows

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:11:19 +0200

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The video shows a tmux session with a couple of windows and the current window with 3 panes. Then suddenly a popup window opens in the center. It opens with ncmpcpp - the ncurses media player plus plus. The playlist is opened and then a different track gets selected and started. Afterwards it just disappears.

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.

Shell on www.nixre.net

Tmux Popup Windows