tmux: open terminal failed: missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-256color

Question

I used home-brew to setup tmux on a mac. When trying to run tmux I keep on getting this error

open terminal failed: missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-256color

any suggestions?

Answer 1

Your system doesn't have xterm-256color. You could:

• Set TERM to something other than xterm-256color outside tmux (try just plain export TERM=xterm).

• See if there is a package containing xterm-256color, perhaps a later version of ncurses or terminfo.

• Install it manually from another system with something like:

  infocmp -x xterm-256color > out
  

  Then transfer the "out" file to your Mac and try:

  tic out
  

Answer 2

This happened to me during a system upgrade. Unfortunately I did not see a way besides restarting: tmux kill-server and then run tmux.

Answer 3

you can just type export TERM=xterm in console when you see this error, or put export TERM=xterm in the file ~/.bash_profile and source ~/.bash_profile. then you may never get this error again.
This works fine on my debian.