# Italicized text in tmux(1)



## cjpb (Sep 3, 2020)

Hello, I am new to FreeBSD, installing some VMs in VirtualBox and playing around with them. I like it, but I have run into something that I would like to fix, if possible.

I have installed sysutils/tmux and editor/neovim, and in the latter program, I have enabled italicized text. This works completely fine for any terminal emulators that support the feature, like x11/sterm or x11/qterminal (not x11/xterm). However, it doesn't work with tmux(1), depending on how `TERM` is set. If `TERM` is `screen` or `screen-256color`, tmux functions properly, but doesn't do anything with italics; I'm guessing that GNU Screen doesn't have that feature. Setting `TERM` to `tmux` or `tmux-256color` causes it to glitch out, presumably because `TERM` value isn't in the default system termcap. I found that by adding a local termcap file with infocmp(1):

```
infocmp -rC tmux-256color >> ~/.termcap
```

got it up and working, but instead of italics, it just reverses text instead. Also, with that file, ssh sessions with a tmux session on the remote client do display italics correctly, but not if using the local tmux server, which will just reverse text as well.

Everything else that I've tried doesn't do much better than that. Is there anyway I could get italicized text in tmux?


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