Tweaking Terminal Input From Tmux

3 minutes read
tmux

Ever since I upgraded to Mavericks my Neovim experience in tmux had been less than ideal. It was the oddest behavior and so minor I told myself I could deal with it. I told myself it wasn’t so bad for a long while. For reasons beyond my understanding, I could no longer use my ^H key to move to the left pane in Neovim. I could ^L to go right, ^J for the pane below, or even ^K for the pane above. Not having changed anything in my nvimrc I new it had to be something in the system that changed. The upgrade also required that I recompile Neovim, maybe that was the culprit. Fast forward to last month, I finally made time to dig into this once and for all. No longer would I ^L until I circled all the way around. Unfortunately my Google searches only brought me down the same paths I’d travelled before. Heartbroken, I decided to watch a Youtube video on turning “Vim and Tmux into and IDE Like Environment” to seek inspiration. Mr. ColbyCheeze gave a pretty good walk through of his vimrc. I decided to get a closer look when all of a sudden there it was, a link to the Neovim issue that had slowly been torturing me. It seems that terminfo can’t be trusted. It turns out that ^Hregisters as backspace, in terminals in OSX and sometimes Arch Linux. You can investigate this yourself by running ~$ infocmp $TERM|grep kbs This will print out the key descriptions filtering for the kbs entry. You might see that it has ^H listed for kbs. This is the backspace key description. First fix I saw on the issue was too heavy handed, totally destroying the use of backspace. if has(‘nvim’) nmap h endif Overriding the terminal setting seemed like a better option. After all, if the terminal was wrong why not correct it.

~$ infocmp $TERM | sed ‘s/kbs=^[hH]/kbs=\\177/’ > $TERM.ti
~$ tic $TERM.ti

This loaded up the new values in the terminal correctly but still didn’t change the behavior of Neovim whether I was using tmux or not. A better approach was to have the terminal send appropriate CSI codes for special key combinations. There is a way to do this in iTerm2.

  1. iTerm2 -> Preferences -> Keys ( or Cmd + , )
  2. Press +
  3. Press Ctrl+H as Keyboard Shortcut
  4. Choose Send Escape Sequence as Action
  5. Type [104;5u for Esc+

This worked immediately until I got into Tmux. It would print the literal 104;5u every time. To get this to work in tmux I replaced my tmux pane left command with this bind -n C-h if-shell “$is_vim” “send-keys Escape ‘[104;5u’” “select-pane -L” Here I am sending the escape sequence instead of C-h which is interpreted correctly by Neovim and doesn’t force me to change settings for iterm2 across the board. I rarely use Neovim outside of tmux and haven’t felt a need for a solution that works with and without tmux. It’s fairly easy to swap profiles in iTerm2 to solve for those needs. I hope this helps some of you who might have also gotten stuck on this issue.