Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 3:50 UTC (Thu) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910)
In reply to: Screen and Tmux by marduk
Parent article: GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released

Ctrl-A or Ctrl-B are way too overloaded in other contexts. I never thought they were a good choice for a screen multiplexer. I have long since gotten into the habit of redefining the escape key. I usually make it ^]

That admittedly interferes with "telent", and at least a few times a month I get caught by surprise when that happens. But its sufficiently rare, that it really doesn't matter much. It certainly is an improvement over the default settings.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 18:06 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

What typically uses `^A`? I've not found much that it masks for me. `^B` however is "page-scroll" in Vim which is far more common than "increment word" for me.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 18:08 UTC (Thu) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910) [Link] (2 responses)

Both Emacs and readline (e.g. bash) use ^A to jump the cursor to the beginning of the line. I press is many times a day -- in fact, I press it a lot more frequently than interacting with "screen"

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 20:40 UTC (Thu) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Nitpick & further info: in Emacs itself, readline's Emacs mode & similar tools[1] Ctrl+A is "move to beginning of line", Ctrl+B is "move one char backwards". readline can be switched to a vi mode, though.

[1] zsh has its own line editor implementation that while similar to readline is not actually readline. It does have both Emacs & vi modes, too, though.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 13, 2024 12:15 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ah, right emacs :) . I put everything I can into vi-alike mode, so such bindings are relegated to remoting into machines with broken terminfo databases where home/end or arrows don't work (I commonly on a laptop, so they're not too inaccessible). Luckily the latest macOS 14 now ships with a useful tmux entry in its terminfo database, so that is slowly disappearing as well ;) .