[kunley]

Not always makes sense, especially when the defaults are counterintuitive.

Example: I never understood why tmux folks have chosen different key bindings than screen, as their product was meant to replace screen, not to be run like one inside another. But the brain has been wired over the years. Then I am always remapping tmux to ctrl-a.

There are also other examples when defaults have been made to satisfy some perceived but unrealistic expectation.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I can't speak to specifics of tmux/screen but, generally, one approach to this problem is to pick tools with the defaults you want. If a tool doesn't have good defaults, pick one that does. Sure, you have to be pragmatic about this—if no tool has good defaults, just pick the one with the best (and the best support for configuration...)

[ulbu]

so instead of configuring a single tool, produce multiple tools of different configurations?

you need to put those system parameters somewhere.

[exe34]

that's a very wild take - pick tools based on the key bindings instead of the features you actually need....

[oneeyedpigeon]

Well, it obviously depends on which tools you're talking about. For some types—terminal emulators, text editors—there are so many choices with near-identical feature sets that this approach can make sense.

[kunley]

Yeah exactly, in the said example, tmux survived because it had better features - who uses screen today? The key bindings confusion was a fixable annoyance. We weight pros and cons quite often and not necessarily based on a default configuration