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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

> Except I’ll still want a terminal multiplexer on servers

Biggest reason not to use a terminal multiplexer locally, imo: There is nothing worse than hitting Ctrl-b twice for every action when you're also using the muxer remotely.

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This tmux config turns F12 into a button to toggle the local leader key. You remote into tmux and hit F12, and now your leader key gets sent to the remote tmux instead of the local.

I don't use tmux locally anymore; but I still use the same leader key as tmux in wezterm, and I have a wezterm script to toggle it with F12 just like tmux.

Maybe you'll like it too?

  bind -T root F12  \
    set prefix None \;\
    set key-table off \;\
    set status-style "fg=$color_status_text,bg=$color_window_off_status_bg" \;\
    set window-status-current-style "fg=$color_dark,bold,bg=$color_window_off_status_current_bg" \;\
    if -F '#{pane_in_mode}' 'send-keys -X cancel' \;\
    refresh-client -S \;\

  bind -T off F12 \
    set -u prefix \;\
    set -u key-table \;\
    set -u status-style \;\
    set -u window-status-current-style \;\
    set -u window-status-current-format \;\
    refresh-client -S

I just have Ctrl-a set as the primary, and on remote boxes (where I run a tmux which ends up running inside a pane in my local tmux) I use Ctrl-b. Took about 20 minutes to get the muscle memory to adjust for it and now 15 years later I'm still very happy with it.

You can remap the prefix key...

I think the point of their comment is that if you're constantly connecting to different remote servers, you're not going to want to have to change the config on each server remotely. It's the same argument for understanding base vi as well and honestly does come in handy, but it's very discipline specific, most people don't have to worry about this use case.

In that case you’d probably want to change your local config away from the default.

But this is all very silly, I mean, of course there are workflows that aren’t assisted by terminal multiplexers. I’ve heard rumors of jobs out there that don’t even use computers. Adding one more job to the pile that doesn’t need the tool doesn’t say anything about the cases where it does come in handy.

I prefer it, to the point that I also use the same pattern for my WM with remote and virtual sessions. Keeping the same uniform shortcuts everywhere and just nesting a prefix is a lot easier that having to remember what shortcuts work in what environments. Moving and styling the tmux bar can help (or hurt) keeping muscle-memory mapped to the level you're operating on. At some point, any other approach gets too cognitively complex as you roam and scale[0].

If you only have nested use-cases rarely (or avoid them because you find them cumbersome) I can see how it never sticks but maybe just try leaning into it. YMMV, ofc.

[0]: Please prove me wrong, I'm open to try (:

Yeah, nested is a headache. The terminal use to connect to the server doesn’t have a tmux session running locally. That would be a nightmare.

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