I started using Byobu with tmux for sessions on my various machines, and overall I have to say I’m really impressed. It’s an awesome addition to the arsenal, but if you’re not super familiar with some of tmux’s finer points, byobu can really fuck with your head.

I noticed that disabling the “F-Keys” in byobu gives you access to F1-F11, but F12 is still fucked. That’s because it’s added as a second prefix. On the fly you can fix it with:

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:set -gu prefix2 F12

That command will remove the F12 prefix that byobu adds and give you back your F12 key. You can also disable all the F-Key settings by changing your config file.

The first thing you do is open ~/.byobu/keybindings.tmux. Then add these lines to your config:

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source $BYOBU_PREFIX/share/byobu/keybindings/f-keys.tmux.disable
unbind-key -n F12
set -gu prefix2 F12

Bam. Fixed. Now you’re running byobu with all your F-Keys working. Noice.