How to increase horizontal buffer in tmux pane

Question

I'm setting up a terminal based programming environment, but I'm running into an issue with tmux. I need more horizontal scrolling space to view Pandas dataframes, but my horizontal screen buffer size is being restricted when I use tmux.

I've seen plenty of other answers that deal with vertical scroll-back limits, but I haven't been able to find SO answers or tmux documentation showing how to increase horizontal screen buffer size.

Below are the steps I found to increase vertical scroll distance:

1) open the tmux conf file

vim ~/.tmux.conf

2) add line to increase vertical scroll limit

set-option -g history-limit 9000

Is it possible to use a similar setting in .tmux.conf to increase horizontal scroll?

Answer 1

tmux adds resize-window in version 2.9, released March 26, 2019.

resize-window introduces the option to have a buffer size that is greater than the largest of the client window sizes, and takes parameters similar to the already existent resize-pane, i.e. you can either specify value for any (or both) of the height and width or you can more naturally opt to resize a window "from any of the sides".

After ensuring you are running tmux v2.9 or higher (tmux -V will tell you what version you have installed - if you need to upgrade, make sure you terminate any existing sessions to upgrade the running daemon):

To resize a window, enter tmux's command mode (default: ctrl-b followed by :) then type in resize-window followed by -x <NEW_WIDTH> or -y <NEW_HEIGHT> followed by Enter to set the width/height to an absolute value (in cells/characters).

To instead increase the existing width/height rather than specify it as an absolute value, use resize-window with one of -U, -D, -L, or -R followed by n to increase the size in the Up, Down, Left, or Right directions by n cells/characters.

e.g.

# set virtual terminal width to 2000 pixels
resize-window -x 2000

or

# increase width by 200 columns
resize-window -R 200

There is typically little benefit in increasing the height beyond the size of your actual client window as tmux already offers a huge scrollback and there's no such as vertical wraparound, but if a program requires some minimum space to e.g. layout a curses UI looks ugly at a constrained size, you can work around it with that.