Forgive me for asking a sort-off-offtopic question, but what's the reason terminals - and therefore the programs which run within them - offer such limited scope for ctrl-key usage. A lot of characters are not available for remapping, such as ctrl-numeric-digit, or ctrl-shift-anything etc. What's the root cause of this? Is it telnet related? ssh? And, assuming there's a compromise somewhere, would it be possible for the problem to be lifted with a config option which says "I'm using this shell locally on my chromebook - please don't inflict this 40 year old restriction on me"?

> What's the root cause of this?

It is stems 100% from the terminal emulator. Just install a better one. Test your keys with https://metacpan.org/source/PEVANS/Tickit-0.67/examples/demo...

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/JfHjJXy.png

The only key combos marked not ok are global/taken by the window manager, so they don't arrive at the application.

Not sure why ctrl-a and ctrl-b are such popular prefixes, I use both a lot editing readline.

I definitely hear you on ctrl-a. No idea what ctrl-b does, though?

It moves the cursor back one character (which is the default readline binding). In screen's case, you can send ctrl-a to readline by pressing ctrl-a a.

Exactly! Have you found any decent replacement?

I use a backtick, but don't edit much e.g. markdown in my tmux sessions, and always use $(...) for command substitution so I don't normally feel any pain. One oddity with tmux is that to escape the control character you don't press it twice, you press the escape char then ctrl-b, so that is a lot of extra movement around the keyboard

Backtick is my favorite too. Interestingly I thought it was an obscure choice, but it seems to be the 3rd most popular prefix from an analysis of tmux.conf files on github (after Ctrl+A and Ctrl+Space). I use `` (double-backtick) to escape the backtick and it's eminently reasonable.

Could you bind prefix + ` to insert a literal backtick? I've only ever used the default ctrl-b prefix so I'm not sure.

I like ^Z, since it's about the only keybinding that's not used by common terminal software. To actually send a program to sleep, just double up: ^Z^Z

    # In ~/.tmux.conf Change prefix key to Ctrl+z
    unbind C-b
    set -g prefix C-z

Control-Space is perfect for me

And compliments vim really well if you set your leader key to space.

I use Ctrl + q