How to change background color of a pane in tmux

colorsterminaltmux

I would like to change the background color of the inactive panes in tmux to better distinguish between the active pane and inactive panes. Something just a few shades different than the default. How could I do this?

Best Answer

UPDATE:
A newer version of tmux now allows this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33553372/1204312

~~There is currently no way to do this.~~

See this accepted answer on stackoverflow which suggests changing pane-borders instead.

You can set values for pane-active-border-style and pane-border-style in your ~/.tmux.conf.

See this answer for more details configuring these values (and some inconsistencies between tmux versions).

Related Solutions

How to switch directly to a pane in Tmux

You can jump directly to a pane by typing pane's index while it is showed by display-panes command.

From man tmux:

display-panes [-t target-client]
                   (alias: displayp)
             Display a visible indicator of each pane shown by target-client.
             See the display-panes-time, display-panes-colour, and
             display-panes-active-colour session options.  While the indicator
             is on screen, a pane may be selected with the ‘0’ to ‘9’ keys.

Or instead of typing command, you can use:

C-b q

C-b send prefix key
q display panes indexes

tmux – How to Change the Color of Pane Dividing Lines

You want pane-active-border-style and pane-border-style:

See the entry in the man page:

pane-active-border-style style
Set the pane border style for the currently active pane. For how to specify style, see the message-command-style option. Attributes are ignored.

pane-border-style style
Set the pane border style for pane as aside from the active pane. For how to specify style, see the message-command-style option. Attributes are ignored.

So, in your ~/.tmux.conf you could specify colours like so:

# border colours
set -g pane-border-style fg=magenta
set -g pane-active-border-style "bg=default fg=magenta"

Note, I use tmux 1.9a, and I find I get more consistent behaviour using:

set -g pane-border-fg magenta
set -g pane-active-border-fg green
set -g pane-active-border-bg default

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Related Solutions

How to switch directly to a pane in Tmux

tmux – How to Change the Color of Pane Dividing Lines

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