Make Alt + h switch to the left pane in Tmux

Question

I'm trying to make Alt-h switch to the left pane in Tmux. This does not work:

bind -n M-h select-pane -L

Pressing Alt-h in cat generates the following output in my terminal:

$ cat
^[h

That is, it looks like Alt generates ^[ in my terminal. So, in my Tmux configuration, I have also tried this binding:

bind -n ^[h select-pane -L

I have made "^[" both a literal two character string (i.e., "^" + "[") as well as the special "^[" character you can access in Vim. Neither work.

How to solve this problem?

EDIT: I'm primarily using xfce4-terminal as my terminal emulator, but I've tried using gnome-terminal as well as xterm, and the problem persists.

Answer 1

Actually the secret is how you enter ^[ ;-)

I assume you want to edit your .vimrc

vim ~/.vimrc

• navigate to the correct position
• press i
• press ctrl-v
• press ctrl-[ (on a german keyboard I have to press ctrl-altgr-8 because altgr-8 is [)

After that you should have the escape sequence generated required to write the binding.