keyboard shortcutstmuxvim
I'm trying to figure out how to get vim and tmux play together.
My problem is:
When I use xterm-256color I get vim to work nicely, but the background doesn't render properly.
I fixed this by using screen-256color. This looks nice but breaks the Ctrl + arrow keys (they go in insert mode and delete 4 lines). I want to use these mappings instead to switch tabs in vim.
How do I get this to work?
Caleb is right in his comment. xterm is fairly old and you should consider switching to urxvt -- at least the 256 and utf-8 enabled version, refer to your package manager to install the right one.
I have an identical set up to yours -- awesome WM, vim, urxvt, tmux/screen -- and they all work well with 256 colours and utf-8. I have set TERM to xterm-256color in case you need to set this manually.
Hum... After your edit, can you check if the vim colour theme is properly defined for terminals?
From your screenshot it looks like you are running into an issue with your terminal being toe narrow for everything powerline throws into the default tmux config. I ran into something similar recently¹. It seems powerline does not degrade its tmux config for narrow terminals as gracefully as its vim one. There are, however, at least two things you can adjust:
Copy the powerline module configurations to your home directory if you haven't already and modify the theme for tmux. Try dropping some of the modules until what remains will fit on your line.
Change the overall length allotted to the status segments. As these are set in the powerline.conf file you are including, you will need to set them in your .tmux.conf after that include:
set -g status-left-length 20
set -g status-right-length 150
Those are the default values. Try reducing them until something fits.
Note due to the width settings as noted above, if I narrow the terminal below a few more columns, the right status segment will disappear altogether leaving just the left and window pane name segments:
Edit: I just noticed that your tmux version is 1.8. I don't know for sure if that will effect you but I do know there were major changes to the way status bars are configured going into 1.9 and a quick look through the powerline source shows they are doing version checking for < 1.9 and using a degraded feature set for earlier versions. It looks like you should still get a right status of some sort, but that might be complicating your debug process. I highly recommend upgrading to the latest tmux.
¹ I just recently implemented powerline across my zsh, vim, tmux, and awesome configs, spent a week with it, and yesterday abandoned it. It was just too much pain for too little gain, especially with having to work across multiple distros and OSes. I have, however, implemented basically the same thing without the bulk. My tmux config for example is basically a rip-off of the output of powerline in plain tmux values that are ealies to get working on different hosts. For vim I went with airline; for my zsh prompt I wrote my own theme for prezto that uses powerline-ish features.
Best Answer
Run
catwithintmuxand press the keys in question to find out the escape codes they generate. For me this gives^[[Dand^[[C. Then just map those escape codes directly.where the
^[is an escape character, that you can insert by pressing<CTRL-v><ESC>in vim.