Duplicate a tab in gnome-terminal

Question

When working with gnome-terminal, I found that I often want to open a second copy of a tab: e.g. during a ssh session, I may need a second session at the same host and same remote path; or a second mc when two panels aren't enough. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can't duplicate the entire state of a tab. It would involve somehow copying a whole process tree, which (if possible at all) is black magic (and wouldn't even work with network connections).

The reason is because a terminal program only knows what processes are running under it, but not their internals, and especially not the state of remote processes. You could make it start a ssh user@host with the same arguments as the currently running ssh, but you cannot force it to the same remote path.*

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* I sometimes do this: (connection A) pwd > ~/foo; (connection B) cd $(< ~/foo)