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Idea: Ability to split the window with logs (of different processes)

Open potiuk opened this issue 1 month ago • 5 comments

We love mprocs in Airflow and it significantly improves our developmen environment (see https://github.com/pvolok/mprocs/issues/179) over the usual tmux settings we user.

Our initial experience is great, there is just one small feature that we miss a bit compared to the tmux setting.

In our tmux setting we got used to the fact that we can see outputs of several processes at the same time - to see things happening in paralllel in several processes. This is very useful when you observe things happening as you use the web interface for example - and whlle not absolutely needed, it gives much better observability.

Our dev env with Airflow (Breeze) looks like that today in tmux:

Image

With mprocs, it's way nicer, but also looses this possibility of seeing several outputs at the same time:

Image

I think it would be great to be able to split the output window

potiuk avatar Nov 28 '25 10:11 potiuk

Even splitting into two outputs would be a huge improvement. It has some challenge on the UX but I think it could be figured out :)

potiuk avatar Nov 28 '25 13:11 potiuk

This is something I have been thinking about. But don't have a good plan yet. On one hand mprocs should be very simple by default, on the other hand it certainly needs abilities to configure additional panes. Feel free to share how you see a good setup for airflow.

pvolok avatar Nov 29 '25 11:11 pvolok

Indeed. Simplicity is super important here.

My first idea would be to just allow to split the WHOLE window into two. This has the simplest UX and it should be rather easy to implement.

I think it is important to maximise the usage of horizontal space for logs. Many logs are rather long and look really bad when wrapped, so splitting the pane vertically is I think a very good idea.

Picture is worth a 1000 words, so with a little help of Gemini/ NanoBanana - here is an example of how it could look like

Image

potiuk avatar Nov 29 '25 13:11 potiuk

Possibly switching between the "panes" with Cmd 1/ Cmd 2 or up/down arrow shortcuts with some modifiers.

potiuk avatar Nov 29 '25 13:11 potiuk

Of course both left panels should be fully synchronized (except current process selection) - i.e. r in the top one should be showing the bottom one restarting - those should be mostly views of the same list of processes.

potiuk avatar Nov 29 '25 17:11 potiuk