As a long-time ‘screen’ user, the Ctrl-A issue is almost completely a non-issue. One can easily send a Ctrl-A to the underlying shell using Ctrl-A A. I assume ‘tmux’ has something similar. It’s also pretty rare to need the “beginning of the line” movement in a shell, when compared to the number of times one needs to control the multiplexor. Ctrl-A is also very close at hand, and the vast majority of people are using PC keyboards which also have a Home key that work just as well for movement.

I had remapped <prefix> w to cycle to the next pane so I had no idea of the window list. Thanks for that.

Ctrl-j is excellent for me as a vim user. It's default behavior is to just move the cursor one line down which you can already do by pressing... j (although Ctrl-j can be used in insert mode if I recall correctly).

C-a seems to be quite a common prefix, but as you said, it conflicts with the beginning-of-line command. I’ve been quite happy with C-s so far; if it conflicts with something, I have no idea.

C-s searches forward where C-r searches backwards, if you're used to using C-r to retrieve an earlier command via incremental search.

If not otherwise configured with stty, it's frequently set up for control flow along with C-q. If you find your terminal freezes after typing C-s, C-q will unfreeze it.

Disable with:

    stty -ixon start undef stop undef

Thanks, I didn’t know that! I use the fish shell, which does history searching differently but this is useful for those few times when I’m in bash.

^S is XOFF of software control flow fame. You shouldn't need to worry about it though.

It's a common prefix because it's what gnu-screen uses by default, which is what everyone was using for 20 years before tmux came along.

Mapped mine to Ctrl-Space, no conflicts.

I use ^_ (0x1F) which can be "typed" with Ctrl + 7 and Ctrl + / in most terminals.

Exactly. I use C-z on mine

Doesn't that mess with job control in your shell?

I think I could live w having to “quote” ^Z to suspend a job, but worry I’m going to have ^Z baked-into my muscle memory and end up accidentally suspending jobs on non-tmux sessions.

But that's not a bad thing.. fg it back. ^z is my preference for tmux too.

Interesting. After I posted my comment I saw elsewhere that you can simply hit ^z twice to suspend so I guess that's not a big deal after all.

Yeah I just hit ^z twice to suspend now, and if I do it by mistake (which really rarely happens) I can fg.