tmux with more terminals than panes

Question

'm trying to migrate to tmux from gnu-screen. There is one feature in screen that I can't figure out how to do in tmux. Specifically, with screen I have one window and I can split that into multiple panes and, most importantly, I can have more pseudoterminals than panes. For example, I'll often have two panes but will frequently swap between three different terminals.

In tmux, I seem to always have just as many pseudoterminals as I do panes. What set up and commands will give me the behavior I like in screen in tmux?

Answer 1

The manual page says you can't do this. Quoting:

A session is a single collection of pseudo terminals under the management of tmux. Each session has one or more windows linked to it. A window occupies the entire screen and may be split into rectangular panes, each of which is a separate pseudo terminal (the pty(4) manual page documents the technical details of pseudo terminals). Any number of tmux instances may connect to the same session, and any number of windows may be present in the same session. Once all sessions are killed, tmux exits.