Ubuntu – How to make the F-keys work in byobu, for midnight commander (mc), htop, etc

Note: This only works if you're using Byobu with tmux as the back-end. See other answers for Byobu with screen as the back-end.

Just press Shift+F12 To toggle F-keys on and off.

Example : Launch htop (within a Byobu pane of course) then enter Shift+F12, then if you press F3 you will search in htop processes, not switch to the left Byobu window/pane.

Related question with answer also for screen.

For byobu-within-byobu, you need to know the original, non-f-key bindings for each of the f-key commands.

So for F6, for example, that's really ctrl-a-d for detach.

You can then send the detach signal to the inner session using ctrl-a-a-d. And that scales well with the depth of the nested sessions. So for byobu-within-byobu-within-byobu, you'd use ctrl-a-a-a-d.

There is an alternative, which is what I personally use... You could set a different escape key for the inner byobu. I typically use ctrl-a for the outer one, and ctrl-b for the inner one. In this way, ctrl-a-d would detach the outer session, and ctrl-b-d would detach the inner session.