tmux pan around manually sized window

Question

I have a server-type setup in tmux, with my main server application to the left and some resource monitors to the right. But I'm accessing the server with a computer that has a very small display, so it can't display a lot of characters at once and the tmux layout gets "squashed" when I connect to the server with the small display. I fixed the squashing issue by running :set-option window-size manual to force the tmux window size to be wide enough for the resource monitors to be readable.

But now, I have a question: If the window-size property is set to manual, then how can I pan around the tmux layout if my screen isn't big enough to view the whole thing at once? Like how you press Ctrl+B + [ to scroll up and down a tmux pane, but for the entire layout in general. I hope you get what I mean.

I am connecting with SSH through GNOME Terminal, if that's useful information. My default shell is zsh. I also use Visual Studio Code's built-in terminal at times, but I don't need manual window sizing when I'm using VSCode terminal.

Answer 1

When I do prefix ?, I see (among other lines):

C-b S-Up    Move the visible part of the window up
C-b S-Down  Move the visible part of the window down
C-b S-Left  Move the visible part of the window left
C-b S-Right Move the visible part of the window right

C-b is Ctrl+b, the default prefix. S-Up is Shift+↑. Thus the sequence of keys to move the visible part of the window up is:

Ctrl+b Shift+↑

Similarly for the other three directions.

I haven't set these sequences up by myself, they must be in the default config; so I believe they should work for you out of the box. tmux -V prints tmux 3.3a for me.

---

If you want to bind these to some other combinations of keys, it's good to know the actual commands. Invoke tmux list-keys and you will see (among other lines):

bind-key -r -T prefix       S-Up                 refresh-client -U 10
bind-key -r -T prefix       S-Down               refresh-client -D 10
bind-key -r -T prefix       S-Left               refresh-client -L 10
bind-key -r -T prefix       S-Right              refresh-client -R 10

-r here means if you hold the post-prefix combination (e.g. Shift+↑) then the action will be repeated (if the timings are right, see this question and my answer there).