tmux man-page search highlighting

Question

When I search in, for example, man ls while in a tmux session, the search strings don't appear highlighted - the page jumps down so that the search string is on the top line of the buffer, as expected, but it's not highlighted.

Doing the same thing in the same shell while not in a tmux session results in highlighted search strings.

I have no idea where to start looking to solve this. Any hints are appreciated.

Answer 1

This thread is a few years old but is still the one that comes up as the best search result, so I'm answering with what finally worked for me. This is based off of tmux FAQ.

...but the instructions aren't completely clear on when or where to substitute the -256color string. I use gnome-terminal (v 3.16.2) with tmux, and this worked for me:

$ mkdir $HOME/.terminfo/
$ screen_terminfo="screen-256color"
$ infocmp "$screen_terminfo" | sed \
  -e 's/^screen[^|]*|[^,]*,/screen-256color|screen with italics support,/' \
  -e 's/%?%p1%t;3%/%?%p1%t;7%/' \
  -e 's/smso=[^,]*,/smso=\\E[7m,/' \
  -e 's/rmso=[^,]*,/rmso=\\E[27m,/' \
  -e '$s/$/ sitm=\\E[3m, ritm=\\E[23m,/' > /tmp/screen.terminfo
$ tic /tmp/screen.terminfo

And tell tmux to use it in ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

Note: I tried it once without the -256color and since that didn't work (still seeing italics instead of highlighting), I had to delete everything under the .terminfo dir (another dir called 's') before the infocmp would work.

Answer 2

Based on Less Colors For Man Pages by Gen2ly, here is my man page and how to do it:

Preview

This is a shell, not a web page !

How to

1. (optional) I'm using Tomorrow theme for Konsole/Yakuake ;

2. Edit your ~/.bashrc ~/.zshrc, etc. to add :

   # Colored man pages: http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/less-colors-for-man-pages/
   # Less Colors for Man Pages
   export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'       # begin blinking
   export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m'  # begin bold
   export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'           # end mode
   export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'           # end standout-mode
   export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[38;5;016m\E[48;5;220m'    # begin standout-mode - info box
   export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'           # end underline
   export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m' # begin underline
   

3. Reload your config and try a man page search :

   . ~/.bashrc && man ls
   

Answer 3

Fixed it. The problem is to do with the way that the screen $TERM handles italics. From the tmux FAQ:

vim displays reverse video instead of italics, while less displays italics (or just regular text) instead of reverse. What's wrong?

This matches my problem exactly. The $PAGER used by man is less by default - basically, man uses less to show the contents of the manual pages. In my case, less wasn't highlighting text, just showing regular text.

The reason for this happening:

Screen's terminfo description lacks italics mode and has standout mode in its place, but using the same escape sequence that urxvt uses for italics. This means applications (like vim) looking for italics will not find it and might turn to reverse in its place, while applications (like less) asking for standout will end up with italics instead of reverse.

The solution is to make a new terminfo file for tmux, which lets it know that italics are supported. The solution's outlined in the (at time of writing) very, very bottom of the tmux FAQ.

After creating the new terminfo file, in tmux: C-b :source-file /absolute/path/to/.tmux.conf (from this SuperUser question) - this should make tmux reload the .tmux.conf file. However, this didn't work for me, and the changes only applied after restarting the tmux server (close all tmux sessions, then re-open them).