The key names used by send-keys
are the same ones that bind-key
uses.
From the Key Bindings section of the tmux manpage:
When specifying keys, most represent themselves (for example ‘A’ to ‘Z’). Ctrl keys may be prefixed with ‘C-’ or ‘^’, and Alt (meta) with ‘M-’. In addition, the following special key names are accepted: Up, Down, Left, Right, BSpace, BTab, DC (Delete), End, Enter, Escape, F1 to F20, Home, IC (Insert), NPage/PageDown/PgDn, PPage/PageUp/PgUp, Space, and Tab.
Although they are not listed in the man page, there are also special names for keypad-specific keys: KP0
through KP9
, KP/
, KP*
, KP-
, KP+
, KP.
, and KPEnter
.
Several of the more cryptic key names (BTab
, IC
, DC
, NPage
, PPage
) probably come from the terminfo library.
Emacs shares the convention of using C-
and M-
prefixes to indicate modifiers (I would not be surprised if there were earlier uses of this convention).