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Accepted
Jorge Castro
Asked: 2012-06-05 18:37:10 +0800 CST

How do I make the F-keys work in byobu, for midnight commander (mc), htop, etc?

  • 772

I use byobu with the tmux backend on my 12.04 server. I'd like to use the midnight commander shortcut keys with it, but the F keys don't work.

I've seen some posts on the issues here:

but they are out of date and don't seem to work for newer versions of byobu. How can I either work around this or use MC in a way that works better?

command-line

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can easily toggle on/off the use of the F-keys inside of Byobu (tmux) by pressing either:

    • shift-F12 (in tmux)

    • ctrl-a-! (in screen)

    Full disclosure: I'm the author and maintainer of Byobu.

    • 90

  2. On midnight commander to trigger for example the F2 key:

    • Press Alt+2 (simultaneously)
    • Press ESC, 2 (one after the other).

    Which is more convenient than switching using:

    • Shift+F12 (in tmux, default on byobu)

    • Ctrl+A+! (in screen)

    • 13

  3. Hah, a man after my own heart :)

    Short answer: add my ppa (ppa:izx/private) and update byobu (or manually install the deb). Byobu will default to screen as the backend with F-key behavior restored to old 4.x style.

    Long answer: Use byobu-select-backend to switch to screen if you haven't already, and add line $BYOBU_PREFIX/share/byobu/keybindings/f-keys.screen.disable after the line $BYOBU_PREFIX/share/byobu/keybindings/f-keys.screen in /usr/share/byobu/keybindings/common.

    Entire patch:

    +++ byobu-5.17/usr/share/byobu/keybindings/common
@@ -1 +1,3 @@
 source $BYOBU_PREFIX/share/byobu/keybindings/f-keys.screen
+source $BYOBU_PREFIX/share/byobu/keybindings/f-keys.screen.disable
+
--- byobu-5.17.orig/etc/byobu/backend
+++ byobu-5.17/etc/byobu/backend
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
 # BYOBU_BACKEND can currently be "screen" or "tmux"
 # Override this on a per-user basis by editing "$BYOBU_CONFIG_DIR/backend"
 # or by launching either "byobu-screen" or "byobu-tmux" instead of "byobu".
-#BYOBU_BACKEND="tmux"
+BYOBU_BACKEND="screen"
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