256 Colors in xterm and tmux [in FreeBSD 10]

Question

So these past few days I am working to make Xterm and tmux show all the 256 colors available in them by default. I reach these conclusions:

• for tmux to show 256 colors you have to make xterm to show it.
• export TERM=xterm-256color in ~/.bashrc make xterm to show all 256 color. but this is problematic; when you do that you set the whole terminal to xterm and even urxvt will report back its $TERM as Xterm not rxvt-unicode-256color.

So I am looking for the way to just target the xterm. and leave other terminal emulators alone.

PS: I had the same problem ith Urxvt but I solved it by tweaking its Makefile and removed --with-rxvt

Answer 1

To do this specifically for xterm, add the following line to your ~/.Xresources file:

xterm*termName: xterm-256color

The reload your .Xresources with:

xrdb ~/.Xresources

Or logout then back in again.

Another option would be to add the following to your .bashrc (or equivalent file that will be sourced when your shell starts):

[ "$TERM" = xterm ] && export TERM=xterm-256color

The only danger with this is that many other terminals that are not actually xterm set TERM to xterm. If you find yourself using one like this that does not support 256 colours, you may have issues.

Answer 2

Add

case "$TERM" in
xterm*)
  TERM=xterm-256color;;
rxvt*)
  ;;
*)
  ;;
esac

to your .bashrc