Fixing colors in Emacs themes in tmux

For years I’ve struggled with certain themes in Emacs having incorrect colors when run in the terminal (emacs -nw) but appearing correct in GUI Emacs. Finally found a solution - the issue was with tmux. The fix for me was to include this in my .tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal 'screen-256color'
set -ga terminal-overrides ',*256col*:Tc'

This comes from this comment in this GitHub issue. There are a number of other similar suggested fixes in that thread if this doesn’t work.

One thing that made testing this easier is this script:

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lifepillar/09a44b8cf0f9397465614e622979107f/raw/24-bit-color.sh >24-bit-color.sh
bash 24-bit-color.sh

With the correct settings, each row of colors is an almost smooth gradient. With the incorrect settings, there are clear discrepancies in the gradient.

Just in case the original goes missing, it is replicated below:

#!/bin/bash
#
#   This file echoes a bunch of 24-bit color codes
#   to the terminal to demonstrate its functionality.
#   The foreground escape sequence is ^[38;2;<r>;<g>;<b>m
#   The background escape sequence is ^[48;2;<r>;<g>;<b>m
#   <r> <g> <b> range from 0 to 255 inclusive.
#   The escape sequence ^[0m returns output to default

setBackgroundColor()
{
    echo -en "\x1b[48;2;$1;$2;$3""m"
}

resetOutput()
{
    echo -en "\x1b[0m\n"
}

# Gives a color $1/255 % along HSV
# Who knows what happens when $1 is outside 0-255
# Echoes "$red $green $blue" where
# $red $green and $blue are integers
# ranging between 0 and 255 inclusive
rainbowColor()
{
    let h=$1/43
    let f=$1-43*$h
    let t=$f*255/43
    let q=255-t

    if [ $h -eq 0 ]
    then
        echo "255 $t 0"
    elif [ $h -eq 1 ]
    then
        echo "$q 255 0"
    elif [ $h -eq 2 ]
    then
        echo "0 255 $t"
    elif [ $h -eq 3 ]
    then
        echo "0 $q 255"
    elif [ $h -eq 4 ]
    then
        echo "$t 0 255"
    elif [ $h -eq 5 ]
    then
        echo "255 0 $q"
    else
        # execution should never reach here
        echo "0 0 0"
    fi
}

for i in `seq 0 127`; do
    setBackgroundColor $i 0 0
    echo -en " "
done
resetOutput
for i in `seq 255 128`; do
    setBackgroundColor $i 0 0
    echo -en " "
done
resetOutput

for i in `seq 0 127`; do
    setBackgroundColor 0 $i 0
    echo -n " "
done
resetOutput
for i in `seq 255 128`; do
    setBackgroundColor 0 $i 0
    echo -n " "
done
resetOutput

for i in `seq 0 127`; do
    setBackgroundColor 0 0 $i
    echo -n " "
done
resetOutput
for i in `seq 255 128`; do
    setBackgroundColor 0 0 $i
    echo -n " "
done
resetOutput

for i in `seq 0 127`; do
    setBackgroundColor `rainbowColor $i`
    echo -n " "
done
resetOutput
for i in `seq 255 128`; do
    setBackgroundColor `rainbowColor $i`
    echo -n " "
done
resetOutput

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0