Using Tmux Remotely Within a Local Tmux Session

I often SSH to remote servers, and those servers usually have tmux installed. (tmux is better than Screen in every way) However, conflicts arise when you want to manipulate a remote tmux session within a local one. Ctrl-B refers to the local tmux session, not the remote one, and you have to press Ctrl-B twice to manipulate the remote one. This is pretty annoying. Fortunately, there is a solution to this.

There is one line you need to add to your ~/.tmux.conf (if this file doesn’t exist, create it):

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bind-key -n C-a send-prefix

This binds the command send-prefix to Ctrl-A. Basically, you are sending a Ctrl-B (assuming you’ve left tmux at its defaults) directly to the server when you press Ctrl-A. This will let you manipulate the remote session with Ctrl-A and still use your local session with Ctrl-B. Pretty nice, eh?

Source: StackOverflow