I have tmux 1.5 installed on a couple of Ubuntu machines and I have this in my ~/.tmux.conf:
unbind-key C-b
set-option -g prefix C-\
So, on a couple of RedHat machines I have ssh access to (but not root) I compiled tmux 1.6 and installed it in my directory. Now when I try to set C-\ as my prefix, I get this on startup:
/home/user/.tmux.conf: 2: line continuation at end of file
Obviously its not parsing the file correctly. As a test I change it to:
unbind-key C-b
set-option -g prefix C-'
And I get:
/home/user/.tmux.conf: 2: invalid or unknown command: set-option -g prefix C-'
So it's still not parsing correctly.
However, this does work:
unbind-key C-b
set-option -g prefix C-o
So it seems to be a problem with non-alphanumeric keys.
any ideas>
Best Answer
In tmux 1.6 a backslash at the end of a configuration line acts as a line continuation character. You can arrange to get the backslash to the command itself in several ways:
Simply make sure it is not the last character. Put a space after it, or a space and a comment:
Wrap it in single quotes:
Wrap it in double quotes (and escape it, since backslash is special inside double quotes):
Your
C-'
was failing because the single quote was starting a quoted string (the error message is not so helpful here).Also, there is no standard control character or sequence for Control-', so tmux would have complained (
bad key: C-'
) even if you had double quoted it to get it past the initial parsing stage; there are only a handful of non-alphabetic control characters:@[\]^_?
.