Get TMux scroll buffer contents

Question

With TMux, is there any way to programmatically retrieve scroll buffer content from above the current command line?

I'm basically looking to write a bash script to iterate upwards until I find a matching string. To be clear, I don't want to go through history of typed commands; I want to go through everything that appeared on the console.

Answer 1

With tmux 1.5 (and later), you can give negative numbers to the -S option of capture-pane to access the scroll back buffer.

Examples:

• Capture (up to) 32768 lines of the scroll back buffer along with the pane’s current text:

  tmux capture-pane -pS -32768
  

• Capture just the tenth most recently “scrolled off” line:

  tmux capture-pane -pS -10 -E -10
  

• Capture (up to) the 100 most-recently “scrolled off” lines:

  tmux capture-pane -pS -100 -E -1
  

• Capture eleven lines that straddle the current top line of the pane (5 “scrolled off” lines, and the top 6 lines of the pane):

  tmux capture-pane -pS -5 -E 5
  

Note: As with most tmux commands, you can use -t to target a specific pane if the “current” pane is not the one you are interested in probing.

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The above examples also use the -p option to capture-pane, which is only available starting in tmux 1.8. With older versions you could work around not having it by using save-buffer:

tmux capture-pane -S -32768 \; save-buffer - \; delete-buffer