From screen to tmux

Mikael Ståldal

14 October 2023

I have written about how to configure screen in XTerm to support Ctrl-Tab and convenient scrolling back in history.

This has worked well for over a decade now, but it seems like screen is not developed very much any longer, and tmux has gained popularity as a more modern and actively developed alternative. So I decided to try it, and was able to replicate my setup with tmux instead of screen. The result was actually simpler, since tmux requires less modification of XTerm config.

Add this to your ~/.Xresources file (you need to log out or run xrdb <~/.Xresources for this to take effect):

xterm-tmux*saveLines: 0
xterm-tmux*vt100.translations: #override \n\
                Shift <KeyPress> Prior: string(0x1b) string("[25S") \n\
                Shift <KeyPress> Next: string(0x1b) string("[25T") \n

Add this to your ~/.tmux.conf file:

set -s extended-keys on
set -s copy-command 'xsel -i -p -b'

set -g status off
set -g set-titles on
set -g set-titles-string "#{W:#{window_index} #{window_name}  ,[#{window_index} #{window_name}]  }"
set -g mouse on

# Ctrl-Tab
bind-key -T root C-Tab next-window

# Ctrl-Shift-Tab
set -s user-keys[0] "\033[Z"
bind-key -T root User0 previous-window

# Shift-PageUp
set -s user-keys[1] "\033[25S"
bind-key -T root User1 copy-mode -eu
bind-key -T copy-mode User3 send-keys -X page-up

# Shift-PageDown
set -s user-keys[2] "\033[25T"
bind-key -T copy-mode User2 send-keys -X page-down

You need to have XTerm, tmux and xsel installed. Then start it with xterm -name xterm-tmux -e tmux