you can force a term type, but it's mostly about term type that says if you're in 256 color or not - i think it's using the screen term type i think there's a -2 option to force term type Yes. What they said. tmux is always cable of 256 color, however it only sets TERM on the inside sessions to a 256 capable if the outside TERM which first ran tmux or if you specified -2 on the command line I have this in my .tmux.conf set -g default-terminal "xterm-256color" # use 256 colors with the following comment: #should really be screen-256color , but default .bashrc on ubuntu 14.04 LTS only #puts path in the title if $TERM is xterm* or rxvt* anyone heard of or use mopidy ? Just came across it on github looks interesting