[possibilistic]

Does anyone else wish tmux were modal like vim, ie. without a "leader" key? My conf file has a ton of custom key bindings for window / pane management, and I'd love for them to go away or become simplified by simply dropping into a "window management mode". Likewise, I'd like the command mode to stay open until I close it. I have some scripted hacks to do this, but it's nowhere near what I'd expect from true modality.

One of these days I guess I could get around to writing a patch. This single feature is probably my most wanted for any software at the moment.

[Cushman]

Yes! Probably my biggest workflow pipe dream since getting some fluency in vim is to be able to drop into an "outside mode". I've cobbled something vaguely modal together for bspwm with abuse of shkd, so a lot of the binds map similarly, but like your solution it's far from ideal.

As for "Why would you want this?" For me, the straightforward answer is "modes are modular". A core concept in vim is that your input can be thought of as a string describing the edit you wish to make, and modes help me keep that manageable in my head: I can first think about the mode I plan to enter, and then separately what I plan to do under the constraints of that mode. It's a little hard to explain, and I'm sure acolytes of other paradigms have their own philosophies, but it fits in really well to my workflow.

It's a subtle thing in the limited world of text editing, but I definitely miss the semantics whenever I leave it, whether to a terminal or a browser or whatever. So for me, it comes down to wanting to bring the cost of task switching closer to what it is in the editor.

[rsync]

"It's a little hard to explain, and I'm sure acolytes of other paradigms have their own philosophies"

Yes, yes they do[1]. Some people (not me) are vehemently, religiously opposed to "modes":

"To promote his preference, as of 2010, Tesler equipped his Subaru automobile with a personalized California license plate with the license number "NO MODES". Along with others, he has also been using the phrase "Don't Mode Me In" for years, as a rally cry to eliminate or reduce modes."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler

[geoka9]

Maybe because I'm an emacs user, I find it pretty intuitive. As a ratpoison/conkeror/emacs/tmux user I often find myself juggling at least 4 sets of prefix keys. It works surprisingly well, I just made sure they are in different places on the keyboard, so that I don't mix them up.

[jbnicolai]

Odd. I'd consider myself a 'power user', but I hardly ever find I have that need. Could you describe what you do when you're entering several command-mode lines in succession?

[nicm]

it would probably be a relatively easy change to make this happen with key tables (which are in git), you would only need to change it so there is a way to permanently enter a key table (at the moment the key table is only entered until a command is run from it)