tmux, Hyper Key, and Caps Lock

Please, Sir, I want some more (Caps Lock). There are too many awesome keyboard hacks!

Caps Lock as a Hyper Key

Months ago, Brett Terpstra’s blog showed how to make the Caps Lock key serve triple-secret overtime as…

1. An Escape key (hello, Vim and Emacs!),
2. A “Hyper Key” (a modifier that no other app uses for anything, so bind the hell out of it as Brett describes here), and
3. An “App Flipper” key to toggle between two apps.

.. Or as Ctrl (or Ctrl-A)

I just started using tmux for work. It’s mostly for persistent iTerm sessions on an AWS server, but in the back of my mind, I’m thinking about Vim and/or Emacs more and more often (ssshhhh…it’s OK, Sublime. I’ll never leave you, baby!)

The out-of-the-box tmux keybindings are a bit awkward, but my coworker Dave turned me on to a cool scheme for making them (and Vim keybindings) easier:

1. Rebind the prefix key sequence from Ctrl-B to Ctrl-A
2. Change Caps Lock to send Ctrl. This makes prefix trivial, and makes all of the Ctrl-based keystrokes in Vim super-easy.

Decisions, Decisions

So, do I keep “Hyper Key” behavior, or rebind to Ctrl? Is there a way to reconcile them all? I’d love to hear your ideas!