I’ve been a Terminator user for a long time, and have nothing but praise for the project. The key feature that Terminator offered to me was the simple configurability of terminal emulators like the default Gnome or XFCE terminals, but also allowed for usage of split panes. I’ve seen much praise for tmux in the past, but after trying it several times in the past I’ve always had really large issues with the default keybindings (for real, how are % and “ representative of vertical and horizontal splits?). However, I’ve finally become annoyed enough with my ssh workflow that I decided to give it another shot. After a couple days my workflow feels quite natural. Two main factors that pushed me over the edge have been

maintaining sessions and being able to attach and detach at will
being able to split shells within the same session (no more having to re-ssh in)

These are the key portions of my basic configuration.

Overall niceties

Before getting too into keybindings, there were some basic things that needed to be taken care of. First, we set mouse support for when others need to do the point and click thing. Then, fixing some coloring, and adding the lovely tmuxline to match my vim setup. Finally, I noticed that there was some delay between switching modes in vim, so I had to set an escape timeout to make things fluid. The relevant lines are

  set -g mouse on
  # don't rename windows automatically
  set-option -g allow-rename off
  # enable true color support
  set -ga terminal-overrides ',*:Tc'
  set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
  # load in the pretty tmuxline
  if-shell "test -f ~/.tmuxline" "source ~/.tmuxline"
  # fix escape for the sake of vim
  set -sg escape-time 0

Motion Keybinds

Then, we come to the real issue: navigation and pane management. As said, I was a previous Terminator user and grew accustomed to the keybinds for splitting and resizing. These don’t require any prefix key-chord to be used, so I set them up the same way for tmux, and things seem to work well enough. On top of that, I use Spacemacs due to evil- and org-mode, so I wanted to have the prefix situation be similar. At that point it seemed like using ctrl-space was a much more natural choice than the default of ctrl-b. I also reassigned the prefix-level splitting operations to be similar to SPC \ and SPC - from Spacemacs.

  # clear bindings
  unbind C-b
  unbind '"'
  unbind %
  # nicer prefix
  set -g prefix C-Space
  bind Space send-prefix
  # splitting like spacemacs
  bind / split-window -h
  bind - split-window -v
  # do like terminator
  bind -n C-E split-window -h
  bind -n C-S-Left resize-pane -L 3
  bind -n C-S-Right resize-pane -R 3
  bind -n C-S-Up resize-pane -U 3
  bind -n C-S-Down resize-pane -D 3
  bind -n C-O split-window -v
  # move panes without prefix
  bind -n M-h select-pane -L
  bind -n M-l select-pane -R
  bind -n M-k select-pane -U
  bind -n M-j select-pane -D
  bind r source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Resulting situation

It’s always helpful for me to see what other people’s configurations look like in practice so here’s a screenshot of what my current setup looks like

All of the configuration for my setup can be foundin my dotfiles repository.