I am an avid GNU screen user. I have been using it for about fourteen years and can’t live without it. About two years ago I started using Byobu which adds some eye candy to screen. Recently I started using IRC again. A coworker introduced me to Weechat. If you still use irc, check out Weechat. All three of these programs are available in the standard Debian and Ubuntu repos.

While I’m getting used to Weechat, I discover that the keybindings to scroll through the list of nicks in a channel are F11 and F12. I hit F12 and screen invokes lockscreen. After a lot of Googling, I find that the termcap name for F12 is F2. Digging through my .screenrc I can’t find any reference to F2. Then it occurs to me to check my Byobu settings. Sure enough I find the following in ~/.byobu/keybindings:

bindkey -k F2 lockscreen           # F12 | Lock this terminal

I commented out that line. It took me a little while to figure out how to change the keybinding for my current session. There is no unbindkey command in screen. Instead you bind it to nothing.

bindkey -k F2

Hopefully this helps somebody who has a similar problem.