I switched from GNU screen to tmux when I discovered that the minor bug I had been experiencing for years had been reported several times and always dismissed with “can’t reproduce”.

It took about 20 minutes to properly switch over, and another day or two to discover my own biases and desires. What follows is a discussion of my own preferences in tmux config.

# I don't split windows. Splitting windows into panes is not for me.
unbind %
unbind \#
unbind \"
# flip back and forth between two windows with prefix-spacebar
bind Space last-window
# fix default binding for changing to window 10 instead of 0
bind 0 selectw -t:10
#bind -n C-Left previous-window
#bind -n C-Right next-window
bind -n M-Left previous-window
bind -n M-Right next-window

When I work from home, I open up an ssh window to work and run tmux over on my server there. This effectively embeds a tmux inside a tmux. Alt/Meta is inboard of Control on my keyboards, so I use raw ctrl-arrows to move between windows on the outside/home tmux and raw meta-arrows to move around the inside/work tmux.

setw -g automatic-rename off

Turns out that automatic renaming never does what I want – so I name everything manually.

And that’s it. Nothing else I need, so far, is particularly weird.