Send ctrl-a in tmux after rebinding to it

less than 1 minute read

While tmux provides much better functionality than screen, most of us that work with tmux have been using screen for a long time, and it is more comfortable for us to use ctrl-a than the default ctrl-b, which is finger-strechy. Thus the first thing I will do after installing tmux is to rebind the prefix to ctrl-a. That gives us the most handy way of swapping last two windows by typing ctrl-a ctrl-a.

However, this comes for a price. That is, in a shell environment that is integrated with readline, ctrl-a is used to jump the begining of line. Now that it is mapped as prefix, we can no longer do that.

Surprisingly, the solution is pretty simple. Just use ctrl-a a to send the prefix itself, and use ctrl-a ctrl-a to go to the last window. Specifically, add these two lines in ~/.tmux.conf:

#  ~/.tmux.conf
bind a send-prefix
bind-key C-a last-window

via.

Comments