Is there a way to broadcast key inputs to multiple panes?

[shaozi]

I want to input same key strokes to multiple panes. i.e. press a, all panes receive a.

[wez]

wezterm doesn't support this today

[piechologist]

Since broadcasting was the only feature I was missing in wezterm I'm fiddling with a key binding. I just compose a command in one pane and with SUPER-Enter copy that command to the other panes in the same tab. That's not a full-fledged solution as in iTerm but all I need. It might be useful for somebody else.

Caveat: for now, I'm using a dirty trick to grab the command line buffer. I get the whole viewport and cut the beginning off up to the last prompt. So, unfortunately I need a regex to find the prompt. Is there something like wezterm.action.SelectTextAtMouseCursor 'SemanticZone' but for the text cursor (insertion point)? Or any other idea how to capture the command buffer?

 { key = 'Enter', mods = 'CMD', action = wezterm.action_callback(function(win, pane)
    local prompt_regex = '.+\xee\x82\xb0 '  -- my prompt ends with a powerline character 
    local tab = pane:tab()
    local txt = pane:get_logical_lines_as_text()
    local cmd = string.gsub(txt, prompt_regex, '')
    wezterm.log_info('Command:', cmd)
    for _, p in ipairs(tab:panes()) do
      if p:pane_id() == pane:pane_id() then
        wezterm.log_info('Sending \\n to own pane', p)
        p:send_text('\n')
      else
        wezterm.log_info('Sending command\\n to pane', p)
        p:send_text(cmd..'\n')
      end
    end
  end)
},

[shaozi]

This is nice. But it will be nice to have build in broadcast feature.
@wez do you have plan to implement this? I bet it is a high demand feature.

[wez]

I have no immediate plans to work on an input broadcast feature. This is the tracking issue:

• duplicate input to multiple panes #2658

Adding Pane methods that allow working with semantic zones has less UI/UX uncertainty than input broadcasting and is something that could get implemented more quickly. @piechologist could you open an enhancement issue for that? Having your feedback on what the API might look like will help.

[piechologist]

Thank you for looking into this. I've opened #2968.

That's my first encounter with Lua. Looks like a great choice for scripting an application! It's quite easy to grasp but very powerful and your docs are awesome.

Also, I like doing everything in a config file. It's more flexible than GUI settings are, plus, I can copy the file without struggling with macOS's defaults services.

Cheers!

[matti]

this is the only missing feature to switch from iterm2