TOPIC: TMUX
PandasGUI: A simple solution for Pandas DataFrame inspection from within VSCode
2nd September 2025One of the things that I miss about Spyder when running Python scripts is the ability to look at DataFrames easily. Recently, I was checking a VAT return only for tmux to truncate how much of the DataFrame I could see in output from the print function. While closing tmux might have been an idea, I sought the DataFrame windowing alternative. That led me to the pandasgui package, which did exactly what I needed, apart from pausing the script execution to show me the data. The installed was done using pip:
pip install pandasgui
Once that competed, I could use the following code construct to accomplish what I wanted:
import pandasgui
pandasgui.show(df)
In my case, there were several lines between the two lines above. Nevertheless, the first line made the pandasgui package available to the script, while the second one displayed the DataFrame in a GUI with scrollbars and cells, among other things. That was close enough to what I wanted to leave me able to complete the task that was needed of me.
Incorporating tmux in a terminal workflow
11th March 2025As part of a recent workstation upgrade and subsequent AI explorations to see what runs on a GPU, I got to use tmux to display two panes within a terminal session on Linux Mint, each with output from a different system monitoring command; one of these was top for monitoring system processes in a more in-depth way. Some of that need has passed, yet I retain tmux and even set to open in a new terminal session by adding the following code to my .bashrc file:
if command -v tmux &> /dev/null && [ -z "$TMUX" ]; then
tmux new
fiThis tests if tmux is installed and that this is not running in an existing tmux session before opening a new tmux session. You can also attach to an existing session or use a new default session if you like. That changes the second line of the above code to this:
tmux attach -t default || tmux new -s default
Wanting to have everything fresh in a new session, I decided against that. While I have gone away from using tmux panes for the moment, there is a cheat sheet that could have uses if I do, and another post elsewhere describes resizing the panes too, which came in very useful for that early dalliance while system monitoring.