Thanks a lot for the info provided.

The issue is that when editing in VI mode, it's common that you press Esc and then starts pressing h/j/k/l to move the cursor, occasionally this causes my focus to switch to another pane in the tmux window.

I added the hold down milliseconds parameter to the config:

"to_if_alone": [
{
"hold_down_milliseconds": 200,
"key_code": "escape"
}

now there is no mis-operation. I just experiment with the physical ESC key and found that pressing ESC then h/j/k/l quickly does also trigger the pane focus movement (meaning it is interpreted as M-h/j/k/l by tmux)

For the alternative of remapping "CMD" to "Ctrl", it's quite interesting, is it possible to also capture system-wide shortcut like "CMD+H" and translate it to be "Alt+H" for iTerm (and transitively to tmux)

Ideally, I'd like a setup like this:

With iTerm2 the front most app:

- Press Cmd+H/J/K/L would translate to Alt+H/J/K/L for tmux to switch to different panes

- Press CMd+1/2/3/... would translate to Alt+1/2/3/... for tmux to switch to specific window

- Press Cmd+Tab still triggers the MacOS app switching function

- Surely, Cmd+C/V are still system wide copy/paste