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Comment by pletnes | Hacker News Reader

Tmux is awesome. Although I never understood why they used ctrl-b instead of ctrl-a as the default though - incompatible with screen and hard to reach with one hand.

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Probably since ctrl-a is a well-loved bash shortcut for goto start-of-line.

Not for us vi/vim guys.

I assume that shortcut predates the existence of the Home key? Maybe we can let it die.

The home key is in a terrible, terrible place on the keyboard and missing in many laptop keyboards. Ctrl-A is much easier to reach while touch typing, especially after remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl.

I hope not. I actually find C-a and C-e (for end) _much_ easier to type, especially with Caps Lock remapped to CTRL.

And my own personal muscle memory prefers a different setup, so that's why these things should be configurable, but the defaults should probably match common conventions don't you think?

set -o vi

I used ` for a long time, but it got old pasting old-fashioned shell scripts (which use `…` instead of $(…)).

Nowadays I use C-z: easy to hit with one hand, and easy enough to do C-z C-z if I actually want to suspend something.

I disliked ctrl-a and ctrl-b as prefixes because both conflict with using emacs keybindings. However, it was convenient that, by default, they were different. When I first used tmux I was still using screen on some servers (that I didn't fully control). Being able to use screen on the server through my tmux session without having to double type the prefix was useful.

CTRL-A is the default for GNU Screen, and when you're developing a terminal multiplexor, you sometimes want to work on it inside the terminal multiplexor you're hoping to improve upon. :)

See the tmux FAQ: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/FAQ

start using keyboards that allow you to use left ctrl with your palm instead of your pinky, it's a life saver.

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