Alpha 15: Split Panes and a happy new year

[George Nachman]

Dear iterm2-discuss,

Happy new year! iTerm2 Alpha 15 has just been released. Please amend your new years' resolutions to include installing it! Release notes are below, and here's the download link if you're impatient:
http://iterm2.googlecode.com/files/iTerm2-alpha15.zip

This release has one big feature: split panes! You can divide a tab into rectangular regions, each showing a different session. Also, you can now save your window arrangement and have it automatically restored when you start iTerm2.

Big new features
- Horizontal and vertical split panes. Use Cmd-D to split vertically, Cmd-Shift-D to split horizontally, and Cmd-Opt-W to close a pane. Navigate panes with Cmd-Opt-Arrow keys (but note that you may have conflicting key mappings in your bookmark, as this had been a default setting).
- Save your window arrangement including window positions, size, tabs, and split panes. You can open new windows with the saved arrangement with a keypress or use a new preference ("Open saved window arrangement at startup") to do it automatically.

Small Enhancements
- Make window title and tab labels more configurable so you can remove window number and job name.
- Add global keybindings for cmd-arrow, cmd-pageup/pagedown, cmd-home/end to scroll.
- Make opt-arrowkey send proper escape codes.
- Preferences and Bookmarks windows can now be closed with Esc key.
- When the "hotkey" is pressed, prevent the running app from getting the keypress.
- Made Find With Selection (cmd-E) behave like a normal cocoa app.
- Allow the OS to pick the initial window position if smart placement is off and no saved location exists.- Improved wording of context menus.
- Fixed context menu's "send email" feature.
Bugs fixed- Fix arrow key behavior in paste history and autocomplete windows (bug 407)
- Various memory leaks fixed.- Improved behavior of full-screen tab bar display.- Fixed applescript bug with setting window size before adding session.

[Daniel]

Thanks George ;)

--
"America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist."
 - Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, May 31, 2004

[sln]

Thanks :) This is THE what i really needed to iTerm.



On Jan 3, 10:24 pm, George Nachman <gnach...@llamas.org> wrote:
> Dear iterm2-discuss,
>

[Gavin Sinclair]

Hi George,

Thanks for the update.  I'm not much interested in split panes (yet), but I appreciate the hotkey fix and other improvements.

I tried out split panes though, and have these comments:

 - some "split pane" functionality lives in the Shell menu and some lives in the Window menu

   - I think it should all be in the Window menu

 - I cannot activate the Select Pane Left/Right functionality with the keyboard shortcut

   - the shortcut is totally ignored; the menu doesn't even light up

   - I can, however, access the Select Pane Up/Down functionality with the keyboard shortcut

All the best,

Gavin

[Karoly Czovek]

On Jan 4, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

> - I cannot activate the Select Pane Left/Right functionality with the keyboard shortcut
>

confirmed, but the up-down hotkeys are working fine.

[David Abdurachmanov]

Remember that were might be conflicting key bindings! I had that, Bookmarks -> <...> -> Keyboard and check if you have those combinations. If you have, you conflict.

No problems for me after removing those keybinding found on Keyboard tab.

I am suggesting changing behavior a bit. Right now I have horizontal split and upper half has vertical split (all together 3 panes). 1 - top right, 2 - top left, 3 - bottom. Now if I am in 1 and go to 3 and I want to go up I get to 2. It's quite nice if you are shifting your work between 3 and 2 using up/down key combinations. But if I am doing shifting work frequently with 1 and 3 it's a bit more complicated, you still have to go though 2. I would like iTerm2 to remember in which pane I was in. So if I go up and I have two panes, I would go the one which I was before. In my case to 1, not to 2. I had been in 2 and went to 3 and going up again would lead me to 2. I hope you got it :)

-david

[George Nachman]

That's a good idea, David. Would you mind filing a feature request for it? I can have each pane remember how you got to it through each of its four sides and use that to disambiguate when exiting via a given side.

[David Abdurachmanov]

Sure, will be filled in next few hours (dinner time!)

-david

[Zeke]

Split planes do look like they could be awesome, for some reason I
cannot convince our sysadmins that they really want to compile screen
with vertical split support...

Sadly I appear to either be doing something wrong, or am having
difficulties with this feature. While I can use the keyboard and menu
shortcuts without issue, I cannot get two planes to simultaneously be
visible. When one is active the others are blacked out. Am I doing
something wrong, or was this the intended behavior.

Example images with each of two planes active
http://i.imgur.com/SPKgC.png
http://i.imgur.com/R5IWo.png

~Zeke

[George Nachman]

Weird. It looks like alpha blending is not working normally on your machine. Try turning off "Dim inactive split panes" under preferences->general and see if that fixes the problem for you.

[Zeke]

That fixes it completely, didn't notice that option earlier, many
thanks.

If there is any profiling/debugging info you would like about my setup
let me know and I would be please to oblige.

~Zeke

[George Nachman]

Can you think of anything you have installed that might affect how graphics are drawn? Is your machine unusual in some way? I can't think of what could possibly cause this!