Home/End keys do not work in tmux

Question

I\'m currently using tmux with xterm-256color $TERM variable. When in bash under tmux, pressing home/end would insert tilde characters (~). Outside of tmux the home/end keys wor

Answer 1

Add the following to your .tmux.conf:

bind-key -n Home send Escape "OH"
bind-key -n End send Escape "OF"

And you're done!

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Explanation

After attempting each one of these, and several others I saw while perusing other answers and documentation, this finally worked for me in every scenario I threw at it. I can't promise the same for you, because everyone's scenarios are different, but this is what I ended up with.

This was discovered after introducing the same trial/error and logic from this somewhat related article. The only difference is where the translation is occurring; in my case, this happens within my .tmux.conf, rather than .bashrc or .zshrc (Mainly because my home/end worked fine outside of tmux)

Debugging

You can debug this issue by using cat -v like referenced in the article above.

Run cat -v, then press the Home and End keys. Exit using Ctrl+C.

$ cat -v

Here's what my output looked like within tmux using zsh, zsh, and bash:

tmux

➜  ~ cat -v
^[[1~^[[4~^C

zsh

➜  ~ cat -v
^[[H^[[F

bash

bash-3.2$ cat -v
^[[H^[[F

Solutioning

Compare the above examples to what we're expecting to see, by pairing tput with cat -v:

$ tput khome | cat -v; echo
^[OH
$ tput kend | cat -v; echo
^[OF

Conclusion

Because this problem exists solely with tmux, and not within the emulators themselves, I opted to make the bind changes within the tmux configuration instead. By using bind-key paired with send, we can use the Escape keyword paired with the sequence we want to achieve our translation. Thus:

bind-key -n NAME_OF_KEY send Escape SEQUENCE_GOES_HERE

This debugging and solutioning process can be applied to any other key translation issues. But, don't go too crazy. Some keys are mapped to certain escape sequences for a reason. Notice how bash and zsh received the ^[[H sequence for Home instead of ^[OH; it's probably not recommended we override this in our .zshrc unless we're having major issues with this in zsh.