Mounir Lamouri's Blog

256 colors terminal with tmux and urxvt

By Mounir Lamouri on March 21, 2010 - 11:39

A few days ago, I was trying to change my vim theme for a 256-color one and I realized urxvt was not supporting 256 colors out of the box. Hopefully, there is a patch to get a 256 colors terminal with urxvt. It is available in the the Gentoo package, you just have to enable the xterm-color USE flag for rxvt-unicode like this:

echo "x11-terms/rxvt-unicode xterm-color >> /etc/portage/package.use

If you recompile rxvt-unicode, you should now get more colors. You can test it by using a 256-color vim theme like desert256 ¹. You can also run:

tput colors

I got 88 instead of 256. I don't know why but it's still a lot better than 16 colors.

Now, you have to make sure tmux is using 256 colors otherwise you will get a weird behavior. According to the tmux FAQ, it is really easy and you have to add a this line in ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

In my system it was not working so I have to tell tmux my terminal supports 256 colors by using '-2' argument. You can add this line to your ~/.bashrc to always call tmux with '-2':

alias tmux="tmux -2"

Now, if you run tput colors in a tmux session, you should get 256.

If you are using vim, you should add this line to you ~/.vimrc:

set t_Co=256

Hope this is helping !