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Best thing I ever did for tmux was to get rid of the annoying command prefix altogether and just use bindings with Ctrl/Shift and the arrow keys - it's much faster, e.g.

    # Window switching
    bind -n S-up    new-window
    bind -n S-down  confirm-before -p "kill-window #W? (y/n)" kill-window
    bind -n S-left  prev
    bind -n S-right next

    # Pane switching
    bind -n C-left  select-pane -L
    bind -n C-right select-pane -R
    bind -n C-down  select-pane -D
    bind -n C-up    select-pane -U

    # Special pane operations
    bind -n C-M-up    respawn-pane -k
    bind -n C-M-down  kill-pane
    bind -n C-M-left  swap-pane -U
    bind -n C-M-right swap-pane -D
  
    # Window splitting
    bind -n C-M-\ split-window -h
    bind -n C-M-] split-window -v

Have you ever heard about byobu? It's basically a tmux wrapper with crtl/shift hotkeys by default.

C-M-left,right is used in some wm to cycle desktops, otherwise good idea.

Thanks ! I was looking for gnome shell style navigation

Interesting choice. I've been using ` (backtick) for command key, which has the advantage of not requiring a control key input.

I just realized though that I don't have a mapping for last-window. And there doesn't seem to be a default.

Did you also get in the habit of using $(<command>) instead of `<command>` for substitution? I keep falling back into using backticks if I'm not thinking too much about it.

Yes. You might look into setting up shellcheck (https://www.shellcheck.net/) as a linter for your editor - it'll help break your habit pretty quickly.

I almost always use that anyways, because then I can clearly see start and end (and nest them easily).

I use a backtick as well. Although rare, if I'm writing a Markdown doc and want to use inline pre-formatted blocks, it's a pain to work around, but otherwise, it's been great.

Not sure if you are aware of this but the bind-key here sets it up so that pressing ` twice sends the backtick through:

    set-option -g prefix `
    bind-key ` send-prefix

I don't find it's too much of a pain to press twice when in markdown.

Nice tip, thanks!

C-\ is an interesting choice.

I use C-_, which can be "triggered" with C-7 and often with C-/.

Yeah, C-b takes way too much hand stretching for common use with a single hand. I remapped mine to C-z instead. I don't miss have C-z to interrupt a program, because when using tmux, I tend to open new shells instead.

> It also restores access to C-b for "back one character" in emacs

If you run emacs as a daemon you can do pretty much everything tmux/screen do, without sacrificing precious keystrokes :P

Good heavens, how do you send SIGQUIT to your programs then?

As c256 surmised, I use kill to send signals other than SIGKILL. I don't think I've ever even known about the C-\ or C-y bindings for SIGQUIT. I also hardly ever use shell job control, to the extent that I have an alias fg that does something unrelated, so I would need to say \fg to get the shell foreground command.

But if for some reason I wanted to do that, I would use C-\ : send-prefix. That sends the prefix character to the process running in tmux, in this case the shell. It's also super useful if you ever find yourself running a nested tmux (i.e. in an ssh session) with the same prefix character. You can just send-prefix d to disconnect the remote shell from the remote tmux session, then open a new local shell outside of your local tmux session, log in and reconnect to the remote tmux.

Well, I was half-joking :-) and I did expect that few people would know about C-\ for SIGQUIT. Myself, I find it very useful for programs written by people who think it's a good idea to capture SIGINT (it's not), because same people (and I will refrain from using adjectives) forget about SIGQUIT most of the time. Which means I can quickly kill a misbehaving program without typing something in a separate shell.

You can just send-prefix d to disconnect the remote shell from the remote tmux session, then open a new local shell outside of your local tmux session, log in and reconnect to the remote tmux.

You can open a new shell and reconnect to the remote tmux first, then use Ctrl-b, Shift-D to bring up a list of connected sessions and kick off / detach the nested original one you don't want.

I also use C-\ as prefix, but I have additionally bound "C-\ b" to send-prefix because I do often have nested tmux sessions.

Given that the context means that there’s always a shell available, presumably ‘with kill -QUIT’. I got into this habit myself many years ago, when varied access methods made it uncomfortable to rely on having a full range of key-bindings.

I too use C-\ and largely for similar reasons!