CTRL-a and CTRL-e map incorrectly in tmux

I like to use command-line commands CTRL-a (beginning of line) and CTRL-e (end of line), but when I start a tmux session, these commands don't work. CTRL-key seems to be interpreted as caret ^, as in the terminal I see ^A and ^E respectively. CTRL-b works without any issues.

I'm using xfce4-terminal and zshell, if that makes any difference.

Setting set -g default-terminal 'screen-256color' in .tmux.conf did not help.

Would be grateful for any help.

1 Answer

After making the following changes to my dot files, I was able to use emacs style key bindings also inside a tmux session.

# .zshrc
bindkey -e
# .tmux.conf
set -g mode-keys emacs
set -g status-keys emacs

This answer on StackOverflow helped me solve my issue.