Tmux prefix doesn't work unless ~/.tmux.conf is forced

Question

I'm currently including tmux into my work flow but I've not been able to use its prefix like it is set up natively C-b on start. My work around to this problem is to set another key bind on the following ~/.tmux.conf and force loading it with tmux -f ~/.tmux.conf.

unbind C-b
set -g prefix C-t

.bashrc

#
# ~/.bashrc
#

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[[ $- != *i* ]] && return

alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
PS1='[\u@\h \W]\$ '
eval "$(oh-my-posh init bash --config ~/.poshthemes/pure.omp.json)"

set -o vi

I've already checked bash vi mode isn't conflicting tmux

My work environment is:

• Wsl 2 - Arch linux
• Alacritty terminal run from windows

I'm a new user so please let me know if you need me to provide further details with a command or settings.

Answer 1

There a lots of answers in other forums that solved non-Arch linux users similar problem. After reading the Arch linux tmux wiki entry, I found that tmux config file must be placed somewhere else.

By default, tmux looks for user-specific configuration at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tmux/tmux.conf followed by ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf, as of 3.2. A global configuration file may be provided at /etc/tmux.conf though by default Arch does not ship such a file.

Taken from Arch tmux wiki entry