Huh copy/paste works fine with vertical splits. Just setup tmux to sync your tmux clipboard with your regular x (or osx if you're into that kind of thing) clipboard.

You mean selecting text with a mouse on a vertical split? If so get tmux upgraded to 1.8+ then prefix-z and you can temporarily zoom the window to full screen.

Your information on tmux is highly out of date.

Also prefix-alt-2 will move to horizontal layout of panes.

Yes, the zoom feature (resize-pane -Z) is a game changer for tmux-to-system-clipboard workflows. Before that I would do the block select with my mouse and then weed out all the extra whitespace as needed later.

Woah. Just tried prefix-alt-[n], totally awesome.

Thanks!

Both screen and tmux support a feature you'll really love. Upon hitting ctrl+a/b [, both enter a "copy mode". This allows you to both scroll through the history, and to copy text from a specific pane.

Select the pane. C-b z. Copy. C-b z.

I may have misunderstood what you meant, but copy and paste in tmux works in vertical panes just the same as horizontal panes: http://d.pr/i/93p2/wNHyqVFr (copied from the right shell into vim in the left).

I think he's asking what happens if you have two panes side-by-side and try to select text in one to copy. Does it also select text from the other one?

If you use a mouse yeah, but as noted by others, with tmux 1.8+ just prefix-z and you can temporarily zoom that one pane. So there really isn't much reason to complain about this particularly.

Not necessarily. At least in Gnome-terminal, Ctrl-Alt-(mouse drag) is a block select that works just fine for copy-paste out of a vertical split.

Or do the rotation thing. Or do the copy-mode thing. More than one way to skin this cat; just depends on which workflow you wish to adopt.

This is much more awkward than just selecting it with the mouse. That's a reason to complain.

Well, this is not really the dilemma though. If you don't have vertical splits you don't have this problem, but you also don't have vertical splits. If you have vertical splits you'll solve this problem somehow.

idk what everyone else here is talking about, but I can copy with vertical panes with my mouse just fine http://i.imgur.com/lWxygYn.png

They're talking about using the host terminal's text-selection mode and the system clipboard, rather than tmux's built-in text-selection mode, which does.

I too generally use tmux's built-in text-selection and clipboard when I'm copying from pane to pane, because it's more convenient.

The thing is you can synchronize tmux selection with your clipboard, there isn't really a need for tmux to "support" your terminal's view of tmux running within.

The answer is, it depends. If you copy it with the mouse, you will be copying both sides. If you copy it with your tmux keyboard copy bindings, it will copy just the one side. I don't know the default bindings because I made mine prefix-esc to get to copy mode, vi keys, v to select, y to yank.

Like others have said, you don't use the mouse to drag & drop and copy. You use your keyboard, the way you would do it in your editor.

C-b M-2 to rotate the panes into a horizontal split.

C-b M-1 to rotate the panes back into a vertical split.