Comment by xenophonf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenophonf | Hacker News Reader

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  poor mouse support

Well, not to be too snarky but you _are_ running screen/tmux in a terminal window.

And I hope I'm not the only person who considers having to move my hand off the keyboard and onto the mouse a UX bug.

  every command you send to it has to first be announced
  with a prefix keystroke

A friend of mine revolutionized my life when he showed me how he'd remapped GNU screen's command key from Control-A to backquote (`). Using screen went from being moderately annoying---especially to a die-hard Emacs user like myself---to being an essential part of every Unix/Linux server install I have done since. To be honest I don't understand why screen and tmux don't default to backquote instead of Control-A/Control-B, but maybe that's just the twenty-plus years of Unix-induced brain damage talking. :)

Probably because backquote is very often used by many people. In particular, people like myself who do a lot of Lisp programming. Outside Lisp, backquote is also used in sh (unless you want to give yourself RSI by using $(...)).

And this is the problem in a nutshell, there really is no single keystroke that everybody can agree is the perfect one to use. You obviously don't use backquote much, so for you, thats the perfect one. For me, Control-W is pretty good, unless of course I have to run Emacs at which time it becomes a terrible choice.

  You obviously don't use backquote much

I use backquote pretty heavily, but I find typing "``" to get a literal backquote in the terminal to be much easier (and less stressful on my hands on modern PC keyboards) than "C-a a" to get a literal Control-A. YMMV.

shellcheck has some interesting things to say about `` vs $()

Yes, I noticed. I also noticed that it doesn't justify that assessment by anything more than referring to ` as "legacy".

I'm not sure how much trust I would put into shellcheck. Especially since it doesn't flag the common error of "export FOO=bar" (instead of "FOO=bar ; export FOO").

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