Colors – Getting 256 Colors to Work in Tmux

colorskonsolesettingstmux

I have 256 colors working just fine in konsole,. I thought I'd give tmux a try because, unlike screen, it seems to support vi mode. However I find that the colors of my prompt show up and this is most likely because I have a 256 color mode prompt. What do I need to do to get tmux to recognize all 256 colors?

Best Answer

The Tmux FAQ explicitly advises against setting TERM to anything other than screen or screen-256color or tmux or tmux-256color in your shell init file, so don't do it!

Here's what I use:

~$ which tmux
tmux: aliased to TERM=xterm-256color tmux

and in in my .tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

Aliasing tmux to "tmux -2" should also do the trick.

And don't forget to restart your tmux server: (see @mast3r answer)

tmux kill-server && tmux

Related Solutions

Getting 256 colors to work in terminal multiplexer

Well as you quite correctly guessed setf is not correct capability for setting foreground color in context of xterm-256color(screen-256color) terminfo entry. You should use setaf (set foreground color using ANSI escape).

$ echo $TERM
screen-256color

$ infocmp -1 | grep setf
$ infocmp -1 | grep setaf
    setaf=\E[%?%p1%{8}%<%t3%p1%d%e%p1%{16}%<%t9%p1%{8}%-%d%e38;5;%p1%d%;m,

Note:

you should not need to do alias tmux='TERM=xterm-256color tmux', make sure your terminal emulator when started reports correct value of TERM=xterm-256color
if (1) is true then tmux will correctly set your TERM to screen-256color inside it, also it will for example correctly set it if you are running on linux console to screen.linux, there might be case you need to manipulate it but generaly not

Tmux – Clear to End of Line Uses Wrong Background Color

Unlike screen, tmux does not have switchable background colour erase capability in its terminal emulator. Erasure is always with the default background colour, never the current background colour.

Nicholas Marriott added it to the to-do list in September 2015, but stated at the time that neither he nor anyone else cares enough about it to implement it.

He later implemented it in October 2016, nearly a year after this answer was originally written.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Getting 256 colors to work in terminal multiplexer

Tmux – Clear to End of Line Uses Wrong Background Color

Further reading

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