Fixing 256-color Support with tmux in terminator

I use terminator for my terminal emulator. Generally everything works well, but one problem has been bothering me recently. My vim color scheme shows up fine in terminator but not from tmux within terminator. Everything is okay when using tmux in gnome-terminal though, so it seems to be the combination of tmux and terminator that is problematic.

After a little digging I found out that this is due to terminator setting TERM=xterm in the environment, causing tmux to think that the terminal doesn’t support 256 colors. This is easily verified by the fact that running TERM=xterm-256color tmux fixes the issue.

If terminator supports 256 colors, why is it setting TERM to xterm instead of xterm-256color? I didn’t really dig into it, but the gory details are here for anyone who is interested. The tl;dr is that it doesn’t look like it will get fixed soon.

But since the terminal really does support 256 colors, a simple workaround is to just override TERM in the environment. This should only be done for terminator though, we don’t want to mess with the variable as set by other terminal emulators.

This can be done in the terminator configuration. It’s part of the profile settings though, so if you have more than one profile it needs to be done for each one.

In the gui you can open the preferences and navigate to Profiles -> <profile> -> Command. Check the box to run a custom command then enter TERM=xterm-256color bash -l as the custom command (assuming you use bash, if not substitute your shell). Or open ~/.config/terminator/config and add this line to each profile:

custom_command = TERM=xterm-256color bash -l

Newly launched terminator windows will have TERM=xterm-256color.