There are many options given in the manual. (See the OPTIONS section.)
Create an RC file: ~/.tmux.conf. The contents below enables UTF-8, sets the right TERM type, and draws the status bar with a black background and white foreground.
set status-utf8 on
set utf8 on
set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-fg white
In FreeBSD 10.1, I have had to add -g to the UTF directives.
set -g status-utf8 on
set -g utf8 on
On UTF-8, many SSH clients require one to explicitly define a character set to use. For example, in Putty, select Window -> Translation -> Remote character set: UTF-8 and select Use Unicode line drawing code points.
And to turn off the status bar...
set -g status off
On colors from the manual...
message-bg colour
Set status line message background colour, where colour is one of:
black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, colour0 to
colour255 from the 256-colour palette, or default.
So, to list the available colors, first create a script, maybe colors.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
for i in {0..255} ; do
printf "\x1b[38;5;${i}mcolour${i}\n"
done
Next, execute the script, piping to less:
colors.sh | less -r
This produces a list of colors, 1-255, in this format:
colour1
[...]
colour255
Pick a color from the list, perhaps colour240, a shade of grey. In ~/.tmux.conf, use this value to set the desired color:
set -g status-bg colour240
In Fedora 17, 256-color terminals are not enabled by default. The official method used to enable 256-color terminals by default is given on the Fedora Project Wiki. Follow that guide, or, as a per-user solution, create an alias for tmux to force 256-color support with the "-2" switch.
alias tmux="tmux -2"
Then start tmux to test it.
Note that, as @ILMostro_7 points out, it would not be correct to set the TERM type for tmux from, for example, ~/.bashrc. Each tmux pane emulates a terminal - not the same thing as an xterm. The emulation in tmux needs to match screen, a different terminal description, to behave properly; but, the real terminal does not need to do so. It's description is xterm-256color.
Best Answer
This proposal should be read as a "proof of concept", not necessarily a turnkey solution. May need to be refined / adapted.
You seem to use console_codes anyhow in your
PS1so some extended usage might be allowed. For a "status bar" to appear at the bottom of the screen no matter how that was resized before, theLINESshell variable can be used, as well as some shell integer arithmetics, to shrink the scrolling region, save / restore the cursor location, and print to the bottom of the screen. TryThere are known caveats when dealing with the PS1 shell variable and function codes which haven't necessarily been considered here but covered in e.g. other threads, search in these fora and incorporate if need be.