For the "pretty" argument - sure, why not, but as to changing keybinds... Well, it's like this: ^a is for screen, ^b is for tmux. You can remap everything to your taste, but you're not going to build tmux muscle memory. You're going to remember your own, erm, thing. Why does this matter? For a localhost admin it doesn't, but if you work on many systems, often either fresh or not your own, you need to be agile and you're not going to have the time or opportunity to drop your own dotfiles, plus the systems will be locked down, offline or both, and so it pays off to learn the tool at its defaults. Why nicm went for %/" I will never understand, but he did, and that's that. After screen I had X and Xpra and and Terminator at hand for nearly two decades straight and couldn't be bothered moving to tmux, and when I did, I was considering remapping it to Terminator, but I resisted, and I don't regret it. My personal config has some colours, notably different background for the active pane, a UNIX timestamp clock and mouse on and some buffer and title tweaks, but no keybind changes. But to each their own.