How to get vertical split of terminal in Mac to execute different actions?

Question

Every once in a while I see people using what looks like terminal in their Mac, except that in what seems to be one window they have a vertical 'split.' On one side of the split, they have emacs or something, and in the other they have something else.

How can I have two independent things happening at once in the same terminal window, divided by a vertical split? It looks a lot like split pane, but split pane is a horizontal split and the actions are mirrored in the panes.

Answer 1

Possibly GNU Screen with vertical split?

It should already be installed on your Mac, type screen in the terminal.

You can also do this with emacs by itself.

Answer 2

Download iTerm2 for macOSX from here.

Use cmd + d for vertical split and cmd + shift + d for horizontal split

To navigate between the vertical splits in left/right or up/down fashion use cmd + [ and cmd + ]

I recommended iTerm 2 because of these features.

Also, I like the autocomplete feature which occurs when you press cmd + ;

Features in short include the following:

• Split Panes
• Hotkey Window
• Search
• Autocomplete
• Mouseless Copy
• Paste History
• Instant Replay
• Configurability
• Full Screen
• 256 Colors
• Unix-like
• Readability
• Mouse Reporting
• Growl Support
• Exposé Tabs
• Tagged Profiles
• Multi-Lingual

Answer 3

Tmux will allow you to split your screen into halves vertically or horizontally.

# install tmux
brew install tmux          # on mac
sudo apt-get install tmux  # on debian

# run it
tmux

# split the screen vertically using this shortcut
CTRL+B %

# split the screen horizontally using this shortcut
CTRL+B "

# switch between screens using this shortcut
CTRL+B o

Answer 4

If you like to work with your terminal windows in fullscreen, you can use macOS' built in screen splitting feature like so:

1. Open two terminal windows
2. Toggle one of the terminal windows fullscreen
3. Activate 'Mission Control' (default: F3)
4. Drag the second terminal window onto the first's fullscreen space
5. Enjoy your vertically split fullscreen terminal windows

You can switch keyboard focus between terms with ⌘-[ and ⌘-]

Answer 5

According to here, native terminal (MacOS 10.15) supports splitting pane horizontally by using Command-D.And Shift-Command-D for closing pane.

It's weird to me there is no vertically splitting.

Answer 6

John T's accepted answer (GNU screen, accessed with screen) was what I needed, but I needed a few minutes learning some basics to make it useful. Here is the jump start I needed on key bindings (straight from the man page) - note that you need to install the GNU version for vertical splits (listed after the FAU version that was in my Mavericks).

Also, I highly recommend you skim man screen to see what suits your needs. You can always just launch another terminal using screen and then read the manual...

Screen version 4.00.03 (FAU) 23-Oct-06

(included in Mavericks and likely similar in earlier)

       The following table shows the default key bindings:

       C-a '       (select)      Prompt for a window name or number to switch to.

       C-a "       (windowlist -b)
                                 Present a list of all windows for selection.

       C-a 0       (select 0)
        a|            a|
       C-a 9       (select 9)
       C-a -       (select -)    Switch to window number 0 - 9, or to the blank window.

       C-a tab     (focus)       Switch the input focus to the next region.  See also split, remove, only.

       C-a C-a     (other)       Toggle to the window displayed previously.  Note that this binding defaults
                                 to  the command character typed twice, unless overridden.  For instance, if
                                 you use the option "-e]x", this command becomes "]]".

...

      C-a S       (split)       Split the current region into two new ones.

...

       C-a ?       (help)        Show key bindings.

       C-a \       (quit)        Kill all windows and terminate screen.

...

       C-a *       (displays)    Show a listing of all currently attached displays.

Additional items with 'Screen version 4.02.01 (GNU) 28-Apr-14'

(installed using sudo port install screen just now)

All of the items listed above in the 4.00.02 (FAU) version, as well as:

      C-a S       (split)       Split the current region horizontally into two new ones.   See  also  only,
                                 remove, focus.

Same above, but this clarifies that it is horizontal. ...

       C-a |       (split -v)    Split the current region vertically into two new ones.

Answer 7

After you vertically split on screen, you can type screen to create new instance. Or you can also use iTerm or iTerm2 which can use vertical split. See this link for splitted panes. www.iterm2.com/#/section/features/split_panes

Answer 8

very similar to John T's answer about screen, but you can also do this with tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/). Nice thing about tmux compared to screen is that the vertical split feature comes even with the version you can get from packages(macports or homebrew for Mac, apt-get for ubuntu etc.).

Answer 9

To split this in emacs use ctrl + x, b (control and x together, then b) to switch to another buffer that is already open. You can also click on the filename at the bottom to switch to another buffer.

Here is a list of shortcuts to resize windows and do much more with emacs link text

Answer 10

How is this possible, to have two independent things happening at once in the same terminal window, divided by a vertical split?

You could say it's basically just running two programs within the same window.

In OS X Snow Leopard a horizontal split is built-in, but that indeed is a mirroring function. See also Mac OS X Snow Leopard - split Terminal windows.

Answer 11

The wonderful thing about screen command is that you can pre-configure it using a .screenrc file in your home directory. That being said, the default FAU version of screen in macOS is too old (4.0.3), so we need to update it to the latest GNU version first (as of now, 4.9.1).

1. With Homebrew already installed, run brew install screen to get the latest version. (Without Homebrew, it may be possible via other options like sudo port or sudo apt - these are not explored here.)
2. You need to open a new Terminal to use the new version.
3. In your home directory, create a .screenrc file with these contents:

   startup_message off
   defmousetrack on
   mousetrack on
   split -v
   screen
   focus right
   screen
   focus left
   

   (You can remove the focus left command if you want the focus to remain on right.)
4. Run screen command in the new Terminal window.
5. Since mousetrack is turned on, you can simply click on each pane to focus on it. You can also use Ctrl-A, Tab keyboard shortcut to switch between the two panes. (Note, it's the control key, not the command key.)
   • You can hold the Fn key to temporarily disable mousetrack in order to do normal mouse actions like selecting and copying.
6. Using exit on each window will eventually quit screen when done so in the last window with a shell. However, when you want to kill all windows and quit screen, you can just use Ctrl-A, Ctrl-\ then press Y.

Tip: There are a lot more options in screen such as the resize command. Simply type man screen to explore the documentation! Some tips:

• All keyboard shortcuts are listed in the doc. C-a means Ctrl-A.
• Adding resize +20% after focus right will make the right pane 70% wide.
• You can customize the .screenrc file with more split and split -v commands to create more windows.
• You can also create similar configuration files and pass them with screen -c path/to/file.
• Use the focus command to switch between the windows: focus [ next | prev | up | down | left | right | top | bottom ]
• Use the screen command (inside the file) to start a new shell in the focused window.