Re: Please help me choose a good single-keystroke escape key

[Andrew Schulman]

> Hi all.  I'm running GNU Screen on Cygwin on one laptop, and on Debian Linux 
> on
> another.  (I may switch to tmux one day, as it works much like screen but is
> newer.  But I don't think Cygwin ships tmux binaries.)
> 
> I want to use a single-keystroke escape key in Screen.  Because I almost never
> have more than ten windows open, this will make it easier for me to view each
> open window in sequence, from 0 to 9, until I find the one I'm looking for.
> 
> I've tried the backquote (`) key but I don't like it.  The key's position is
> different on each of my laptops.  This is confusing.

I use the backquote key, because it seems to have the best combination of
least-used and most consistently placed in an easy position to reach.  On
my desktop keyboard it's actually a double-sized key, although almost never
used outside of screen.

To use the backquote as the escape key I just put

escape `~

in my .screenrc.

I wasn't aware of tmux but will take a look at it.  It might not be hard to
package for Cygwin.  I see that it depends on libevent - if that can be
packaged for Cygwin, then probably tmux can too.

Andrew.