Getting 256 colors to work in tmux
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
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
As per the tmux FAQ, add this to your ~/.tmux.conf
:
set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"
Then add this alias for tmux:
alias tmux='tmux -2'
No need to override the TERM
variable in your profile or when starting tmux
.
More information: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/256_colors_setup_for_console_Vim