Slight delay when switching modes in vim using tmux or screen

After plowing through the man pages it turns out tmux has an option for this. The following in ~/.tmux.conf fixes the delay problem:

 set -sg escape-time 0

You have to restart your tmux server or reload your config for this to take effect. To do this, issue source-file ~/.tmux.conf from the tmux prompt.

I had a different but similar issue that I was trying to solve when I found this page, so I'll post that here in case it's helpful to anyone else who is in search of this answer and finds this page in the same way.

Problem: vi mode in bash has a delay when switching from insert mode to command mode

Solution: In your ~/.inputrc file, add set keyseq-timeout n where n is some low value greater than 0. n defaults to 500ms, which is what causes the delay. See documentation here.

Also, if you want to be able to tell which mode you're in, check out Dylan Cali's fork of bash.

As the title mentions Screen, here is the solution to fix the behaviour of Escape key within GNU Screen. (Taken from here.)

Add

maptimeout 5

to .screenrc config file.