The $TERM environmental variable is the second place where Tmux likes to inherit it’s terminal type from, and if you have a miss-match between the value declared by your actual terminal, and by your shell then Tmux gets confused. bashrc: export TERM='screen-256color'Īgain, we are once again telling Tmux the terminal type is screen-256color regardless of what the Terminal says. You could also use xterm-256color but in my testing setting it to screen worked every time, while xterm setting was problematic under some combinations of terminals and shells.

Why screen? Because Tmux is a screen-like program, but it likes to inherit the terminal type from the terminal that launched it. Fortunately, you can usually force it to behave properly by following these steps:įirst, set your terminal (Konsole, iTerm2, Putty) to identify as: screen-256color It appears that Tmux happens to be very finicky about terminal types, and tends to default to 16 color mode rather than the 256 color one required to use Solarized themes. Why does that happen? I’m not entirely sure. But when it is launched from inside of Tmux, the color scheme is off and moving the cursor introduces strange artifacts on the screen. I hardly ever have issues with the Solarized theme in the command line vim when running it directly. This only happens when running the console version of vim from inside Tmux. Sadly, depending on your system, half the time you open Vim inside of Tmux, Solarized theme (both light and dark) look like shit. Plus, the stark contrast between backgrounds makes it easy to distinguish an editor pane from a shell pane in Tmux. I prefer to edit text with dark text on a light background, but dark on light terminals look weird to me. Unfortunately, these three components don’t always go together very well.Īs a rule, I tend to use the dark Solarized theme for my terminals, and the light one for my Vim. As you may or may not know, I am a big fan of Vim, Tmux and the Solarized theme.

Light theme solarized vimr