tmux broken on Mac

[moreleftpedal]

I’ve recently realized that tmux is not behaving correctly on all my Macs running the latest version of MacOS Monterey. Basically the backspace key doesnt work moving the cursor only forward when hitting backspace and also it wont let you clear the screen and throws a ‘terminal database is inaccessible’.

Installed version: tmux 3.3a

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. Anyone have any ideas? I’m dead in the water without tmux. It works fine on my Ubuntu machines.

Thanks in advance.

[SMillerDev]

Tmux now sets tmux-256color as the TERM. You might want to override that if you are using programs that use the macOS ncurses (since macOS comes with a very old ncurses)

[moreleftpedal]

Ahh interesting. I didn't know that. They must have just made that change recently. What I don't understand is that terminal on Mac declares terminal as:

Does that not make a difference since the issue is with ncurses? If so whats the solution then? What do I need to do...sorry if this is obvious.

[carlocab]

You can either add

set -g default-terminal screen-256color

to your ~/.tmux.conf or do

brew install zsh

and use Homebrew Zsh as your default terminal.

[moreleftpedal]

Yes that fixed it! Thank you!

Just clarity I had to create the ~/.tmux.conf file because it didn't exist. Once I created it and added set -g default-terminal screen-256color then everything was back to normal. You rock!