Ubuntu – How to send a literal F6/etc. in byobu

byobuscreen

In a byobu screen, I ssh'ed into another computer and launched byobu on that computer. Now, I have byobu within byobu.

How can I send byobu keystrokes (F2, F3, F6, etc) to the inner byobu rather than the outer? In other words, how do I escape or otherwise transmit these keys to the screen rather than having the outer byobu intercept them?

Best Answer

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.

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