Scp -p /lib/terminfo/x/xterm-256color a programmer I spend a good chunk of my working day in a terminal and have up until recently used iTerm2 for MacOS. Scp -p /lib/terminfo/s/screen-256color /s/ # From the Ubuntu machine to a machine that doesn't have *-256color terminfo entries You can copy the entries to your home directory on the remote machine this works with most modern terminfo implementations. These values will only cause trouble if you log in to a remote machine that doesn't have a termcap/terminfo entry for these names. You can use TERM=xterm-256color or TERM=screen-256color on Ubuntu. nf to indicate 256-color support: set -g default-terminal 'screen-256color' If you run tmux -2, then tmux starts with 256-color support, even if it doesn't think that your terminal supports 256 colors (which is pretty common).Д«y default, tmux advertises itself as screen without 256-color support. You need to use that while directly running in xterm, outside tmux. In particular, it doesn't support the OSC 4 вЂ¦ control sequence to query or set color values. It doesn't support all of xterm's control sequences. When you're in tmux, the terminal you're interacting with is tmux. tmux cannot reliably communicate to the application that it supports more than 8 colors.tmux cannot reliably determine whether the terminal supports more than 8 colors.See Checking how many colors my terminal emulator supports for an explanation. There is some information on 256-color support in the tmux FAQ.Дetecting the number of colors that the terminal supports is unfortunately not straightforward, for historical reasons. Programs can refer to the ansi palette (customisable by the user) or define their colours, picking from a total of 256 colours. Xterm supports 256 colours, despite what tput colors says. Conclusion: no much attention as been paid while encoding the 256dark colours. Instead, this quite happens when in the working directory there are folders, text files and symbolic links. This is not clearly happening for the specific listed files. Observation: in theory the dircolor ansi-dark on Solarized colour scheme should have match closely the dircolor 256dark. Then, changing terminal's profile, also these 16 colours change.ДЇrom left to right, top to bottom, we have Solarized colour theme, dircolor ansi-dark and 256dark, then default ( Tango) colour scheme, dircolor ansi-dark and 256dark. Running this script (slightly modified) on my xterm provides the following result: 256 colours, but only 16 are displayed correctly. Is there a better reason? Sure: I'd like to fix the appearance of other Ubuntu boxes in my office, and I'd like to understand why things work or don't work.Am I sadistic that I complaining why things work? Maybe.QuestionД«asically, does anyone understand why everything works even if it shouldn't? Guake behaves analogously to Terminal and both of them answer xterm to the question echo $TERM. Now the only thing that I understand is that -2 is equivalent of export TERM=screen-256color ( source). Calling tmux provides the 'wrong' expected results.Д«ut calling tmux with the -2 flag makes everything work fine, magically. The only guy who complains about the reduced colour space is tmux. Vim also looks fine, despite the fact that I call it with the 256 flag in an environment where 256 colours are not supported. (To have the coloured ls I eval this in my. I personally set them to purple, on the left, and of course on the right we have 2 different shades of blue. They were looking pretty awful, so I decided to enable the 256 colours support and play a bit around. I'm using a Ubuntu box, Guake, tmux, Vim and I love the theme Solarized. My question arises from the necessity of understanding why I have now (after multiple trials) Terminal and tmux supporting 256 colours and tput colors telling me there are only 8 of them.

Guake tmux