If the keys and functionality don't work exactly as GNU Screen does then this won't help me. The behavior and keystrokes are so far burned into my brain that it doesn't make sense at this point to learn a new tool unless/until every system I use under the sun doesn't support GNU Screen anymore.

That’s great for your own machine or even common home directory scenarios. The issue is when you have a bunch of machines to manage without chef/puppet/etc or hop onto a random machine or a machine you don’t own etc… defaults are what you get to work with.

If screen is there and I need to do something that lasts longer than my ssh session, screen is what I reach for. If it’s non-interactive, I reach for nohup next.

I’m not sure what the screen keybindings are anymore but you could always rebind the tmux key so.

^a is the worst for emacs users since ^a is begging-of-line which we use a ton.

When I first started using screen some years ago the emacswiki (I think) even mentioned it and recommended to remap it to ^p which it is for me for screen and tmux since then.

(I could remember something wrong here)