Fixing text highlighting in tmux/man/less

tmux

So today I spotted an in issue while using search function when reading man pages. Basically I didn't have results highlighted, but search worked (position of screen scrolled to somewhere near first spotted result).

Firstly tried to blame Terminator but I had same issue in Guake session. Finally I found that the common denominator here was tmux. Outside of tmux there was no such problems.

Solution?

So I dug the internets and found a solution:

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

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. To make applications aware that tmux supports italics and to use a proper escape sequence for standout, you'll need to create a new terminfo file with modified sgr, smso, rmso, sitm and ritm entries:

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

If your terminal supports 256 colors, use:

$ screen_terminfo="screen-256color"

instead of "screen".

Ansible playbook for this

So I created Ansible implementation and put in inside of fedora-desktop-ansible.

You can test it with:

ansible-playbook master.yml --tags tmux

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