Tmux Debug

VerifiedSafe

Captures screen content from tmux panes to debug terminal sessions, monitor background processes, or inspect command output. Helps when you need to see what is running in another tmux pane without switching to it. Useful for examining scrollback history or checking on long-running processes.

Sby Skills Guide Bot
DevelopmentIntermediate
1106/2/2026
Claude CodeCursorWindsurf
#tmux#debugging#terminal-monitoring#session-capture

Recommended for

Our review

Capture tmux pane content to debug terminal sessions or monitor background processes.

Strengths

  • Lists all available panes quickly
  • Captures with or without ANSI colors
  • Includes scrollback history
  • Simple and direct syntax

Limitations

  • Requires tmux to be installed and running
  • Only works within a tmux environment
  • Capture can be verbose for long sessions
When to use it

When you need to inspect output from a running process in another tmux pane without interrupting it.

When not to use it

If you need real-time interaction or the target process is not inside tmux.

Security analysis

Safe
Quality score80/100

The skill only uses local tmux capture-pane commands to read terminal output. There are no destructive operations, external network calls, or data exfiltration. It poses no meaningful execution risk.

No concerns found

Examples

List all panes
List all tmux panes so I can find which one contains my server process.
Capture specific pane
Capture the content of tmux pane session:0.1 to see the latest error logs.
Capture with scrollback
Capture the last 50 lines of scrollback from my current tmux pane to debug a crash.

name: tmux-debug description: | This skill captures and analyzes tmux pane content for debugging. Triggers: "debug tmux", "capture tmux output", "check other session", "tmux pane content", "what's in that terminal", "inspect background process", "tmux scrollback". Captures screen content from tmux panes to debug sessions or monitor processes.

Tmux Debug

Capture screen content from tmux panes to debug other terminal sessions, monitor background processes, or inspect command output.

Commands

List all panes

tmux list-panes -a -F '#{session_name}:#{window_index}.#{pane_index} #{pane_title}'

Capture current pane

tmux capture-pane -p
# With ANSI colors
tmux capture-pane -p -e 

Capture specific pane

tmux capture-pane -t 'session:window.pane' -p

Capture with scrollback history

# Last 100 lines of scrollback
tmux capture-pane -p -S -100

# Entire scrollback buffer
tmux capture-pane -p -S - -E -

Usage

  1. First list panes to find the target: tmux list-panes -a -F '...'
  2. Capture the pane content: tmux capture-pane -t 'target' -p
  3. Analyze the output for errors, status, or relevant information

$ARGUMENTS

Related skills