Tmux Shortcut – How to Go Read Only in Tmux

Super_L is an X keysym. Tmux runs in a terminal. It is up to your terminal emulator to transform a keysym into a character sequence. So you would have to configure both your terminal emulator and tmux.

Looking at the tmux documentation, the prefix can only been a known key name with an optional modifier. So you can set the tmux prefix to a key combination you don't use, say M-F12, and get your terminal to send the character sequence for M-F12 when you press Super_L. With a little more work, you could use a key that your keyboard probably doesn't have (tmux accepts F13 through F20 as key names, but they have to be declared in terminfo).

On the terminal emulator side, you would have to arrange for Super_L to generate the key sequence \e\e[24~ (for M-F12) or \e[34~ (for F20) (where \e is the escape character). How to do this depends on the terminal emulator (and some aren't configurable enough to do it). With xterm, it's done through X resources:

! Make Super_L act as Meta+F12
XTerm.VT100.translations:       #override \
    <Key>Super_L:  string("\033\033[24~")

You may hit a snag that Super_L is normally a modifier, and modifier keys don't always work when a non-modifier is required. If you don't want Super_L to be a modifier, you can take its modifier away, or (less confusingly) use a different keysym for the physical key. This can be done through xmodmap (old-fashioned and simple to understand), through xkb (the modern, poorly-documented, powerful and complex way), or perhaps through your desktop environment's GUI configuration tool.

Starting in tmux 1.9 the default-path option was removed, so you need to use the -c option with new-window, and split-window (e.g. by rebinding the c, ", and % bindings to include
-c '#{pane_current_path}'). See some of the other answers to this question for details.

A relevant feature landed in the tmux SVN trunk in early February 2012. In tmux builds that include this code, tmux key bindings that invoke new-window will create new a window with the same current working directory as the current pane’s active processes (as long as the default-path session option is empty; it is by default). The same is true for the pane created by the split-window command when it is invoked via a binding.

This uses special platform-specific code, so only certain OSes are supported at this time: Darwin (OS X), FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris.

This should be available in the next release of tmux (1.7?).

With tmux 1.4, I usually just use

tmux neww

in a shell that already has the desired current working directory.

If, however, I anticipate needing to create many windows with the same current working directory (or I want to be able to start them with the usual <prefix>c key binding), then I set the default-path session option via

tmux set-option default-path "$PWD"

in a shell that already has the desired current working directory (though you could obviously do it from any directory and just specify the value instead).

If default-path is set to a non-empty value, its value will be used instead of “inheriting” the current working directory from command-line invocations of tmux neww.

The tmux FAQ has an entry titled “How can I open a new window in the same directory as the current window?” that describes another approach; it is a bit convoluted though.