News from the Machineroom


Xubuntu, Ncurses and tmux-256color

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I’ve been using tmux-256color as default terminal setting in tmux for some years. Recently, in the quest of debloating my Linux environment and to get more space for more AOSP checkouts, I removed the package rxvt-unicode from my Xubuntu work laptop. As a result, vim colours broke when I started it inside a tmux session. Further investigation revealed, that the 256 colour support was gone from tmux.

The culprit turned out to be the auto-removal of the package ncurses-term, which was apparently only a dependency of rxvt-unicode and neither xfce4-terminal nor libvte9 and consorts. Either way, this was somewhat educational and maybe it will help someone else in the future.

Update 2021-12-17: Fix link to dotfiles repo, the master branch was renamed main.