Preserve empty pane titles during save and restore#581
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Preserve empty pane titles during save and restore#581chirayuk wants to merge 5 commits intotmux-plugins:mastertmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect:masterfrom chirayuk:fix/empty-pane-titlechirayuk/tmux-resurrect:fix/empty-pane-titleCopy head branch name to clipboard
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When pane_title is empty, the save file contains consecutive tab
delimiters. Bash's IFS=$'\t' read collapses these (POSIX whitespace
IFS behavior), shifting every field after pane_title one position
left. This puts pane_active into the dir field, causing panes to
restore in the wrong directory.
Use tmux conditional format #{?pane_title,#{pane_title},_} to
guarantee a non-empty field, outputting "_" for untitled panes.
Fixes tmux-plugins#437
Use the colon guard proposed in tmux-plugins#570 and retain the Docker regression coverage. Co-authored-by: Mateusz Kozlowski <kooziu@gmail.com>
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Jul 21, 2026
When pane_title is empty, the tab-delimited save format emits adjacent
tabs. Tab is an IFS-whitespace character, so the `IFS=$d read ...` loops
in dump_panes (save.sh) and restore_pane (restore.sh) collapse the empty
field and shift every later value left by one. dir is then read from the
pane_active column ("1"), remove_first_char reduces it to "", and restore
runs `tmux split-window -c ""`, which falls back to $HOME. Only panes
whose title was empty lose their working directory, which is why this
stays hidden for most users.
Give pane_title the same leading ':' guard already used for the other
optional fields (window_flags, pane_current_path, window_name,
full_command) and strip it back off during restore. The field is never
empty on disk, so it cannot collapse, and a genuinely empty title is
still restored as empty.
The awk parse sites in restore.sh are unaffected: awk with FS="\t" does
not collapse empty fields, and the field count is unchanged.
This is the lossless approach proposed by @mtkozlowski in
tmux-plugins#570 and carried forward in tmux-plugins#581.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
pane_titlewith the same leading:used for other optionalsnapshot fields;
title and distinct non-empty titles;
When
pane_titleis empty, the current format emits adjacent tabs. Bashtreats tab as IFS whitespace and collapses that empty field, shifting every
later value left. Restore then reads
pane_activeas the directory and opensthe pane in
$HOMEinstead of its saved working directory.The colon guard makes the field non-empty on disk while still restoring the
original empty value.
Attribution
This uses the lossless approach proposed by @mtkozlowski in #570. That PR was
closed before maintainer review; its author is credited in the implementation
commit. This PR retains that idea and adds automated save/restore regression
coverage in an isolated environment.
Test environment
The Docker runner has no host mounts or network access, runs as a non-root
user with a read-only root filesystem, and verifies exact container ownership
before cleanup. The pinned environment uses Ubuntu 24.04, tmux 3.4, Bash, and
a 200-by-50 pseudo-terminal.
Verification