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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?

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2 Answers

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The tmux FAQ ( http://tmux.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/tmux/FAQ ) explicitly advises against setting TERM to anything other than screen or screen-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.

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I like the way to set it in the .tmux.conf best... using the shell to set it just doesn't seem right – xenoterracide♦ Aug 24 '10 at 5:38
Weird. You don't need tmux -2 on OSX but you need it with Gnome Terminal. Thanks for the info, added to my aliases! – F.X. Dec 8 '12 at 16:53
up vote 4 down vote

Try setting 256 colors explicitly in your bashrc or zshrc:

export TERM=xterm-256color

or

export TERM=screen-256color

If you have problems with tmux not clearing the background colors correctly when using the screen term setting, you can try:

export TERM=screen-256color-bce
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the first one is my default TERM setting... I just tried the other 2 and my prompt still doesn't show colors once I enter tmux. (I would like to note that tmux does show colors at the bottom)... it seems that when I enter tmux that it resets the TERM to TERM=screen... perhaps theres a way to override this in a config? – xenoterracide♦ Aug 23 '10 at 9:17
nvm... I guess putting it in a my shell's rc does work... how annoying that it ignores the TERM env variable that's set when I execute tmux... I guess I'll have to put a conditional in my rc. – xenoterracide♦ Aug 23 '10 at 9:21
-bce is not compatible with tmux. Tmux does not support background color erase: – Dustin Kirkland Jan 15 '12 at 14:32

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