Comment 2 for bug 588838

Hey Brian-

That's a tough one ...

We tried to bind all of the F-keys in Byobu that weren't already taken in gnome-terminal and konsole. This basically excluded byobu from using:

# F1 | 'help' in gnome-terminal
# F10 | 'toolbar' in gnome-terminal
# F11 | 'fullscreen' in gnome-terminal

However, I respect your question, and these comes up from time to time. Two programs which are often used inside of byobu on a command line that also make liberal use of the f-keys are htop and mc. I suppose I will be adding alsamixer to that list. The commonly understood workaround is to temporarily disable your F-key bindings while you're using alsamixer/htop/mc, and then re-enable them when you're done. You can easily toggle the f-key bindings on and off with ctrl-a-! (where ctrl-a is your chosen escape sequence).

See also Bug #589016, where I just added a visual queue to this toggle, which will switch the Menu:<F9> to and from Menu:<^a-@> when you toggle.

Hope that helps. I think that's about the best I can do with this bug. I'll probably need to mark this won't-fix or convert to a question.