3.8 release candidate discussion

This issue is for quick questions or comments about tmux 3.8 release candidates. Please do not use this issue for bug reports, they will be ignored - for bug reports open a new issue with full information, see CONTRIBUTING.

Note that it is very important to restart tmux entirely after upgrading.

tmux 3.8 will have many additions, improvements and bug fixes; most are listed in the 3.8 CHANGES file. Many thanks to everyone who contributed and apologies to anyone who has been missed.

A few of the more notable new features are:

• Extensive improvements to floating panes. The key features missing from 3.7 are now complete: panes may be switched between floating and tiled, moved and resized with commands, there are default key bindings, floating panes appear in layout strings, modal panes can take over all input, and a large number of bug fixes. The plan is for floating panes to completely replace popups in 3.9: display-popup will remain for compatibility but open a modal floating pane.

• The default colour scheme as been improved. tmux now has two builtin themes (light and dark). By default, and if the terminal supports theme announcements, it will pick based on the terminal theme. Alternatively, the theme can be using the theme server option. The old ANSI colours theme can be selected with set -s theme terminal. Theme colours can be changed with the dark-theme-* and light-theme-* sets of options.

• Hooks have been completely revamped and extended with the format-based monitors previously only available with control mode. This page has a description of how to use the new features.

• A new fast fuzzy switcher, switch-mode, bound to C-b Tab.

• Customize mode has been extended to show hooks and environment variables and to have some additional editing key bindings.

• Clients mode (C-b D) has an alternative view (available by pressing i) which shows information about client features. Tree mode has a similar new view for sessions, windows or panes.