Comment 5 for bug 887387

Something similar affects me. I can't use F12 as an escape char (clashes with Guake on my desktop), so I tried remapping the escape key in Byobu's F9 menu to ctrl+V. Pressing this combo doesn't do anything, though, as long as I have tmux as a backend (even after restarting byobu). Only after switching to screen, the non-default backend, did it start working.

I'm running this version:
kermit@snowwhite:~$ byobu --version
byobu version 5.17
tmux 1.6