My Windows 10 development setup includes vagrant and babun. Babun is an awesome Windows shell built on top of cygwin babun.github.io with oh-my-zsh. Throw in vagrant to manage development VMs, and I can do all my work via the command-line over SSH.

With tmux installed on the VM, I don’t need to install a resource-heavy desktop environment. The major downside is full terminal support from a cygwin shell inside of Windows. Things start to get complicated when running vim inside of tmux. Specifically, getting full 256 color support is not straight-forward. Throw in neovim instead of vim, and you need to take additional steps. There’s numerous Stackoverflow posts dating back to 2012 on how to fix the problem.

In your ~/.vimrc

set t_Co=256

This forces vim to use 256 colors. If the terminal doesn’t support 256 colors, then this config setting won’t work. Neovim ignores t_Co.

You can determine how many colors the terminal supports with tput colors.

In your ~/.tmux.conf

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

Will force tmux to emulate a screen 256 color terminal.

The arch Linux tmux wiki suggests running tmux -2 if the colors still don’t work.

Lastly, neovim appeared to be very picky with the TERM environment variable.

The environment variable TERM contains a identifier for the text window’s capabilities. You can get a detailed list of these capabilities by using the infocmp command… Text windows today typically support at least 8 colors. Often, however, the text window supports 16 or more colors, even thought the TERM variable is set to a identifier denoting only 8 supported colors…

gnu.org The TERM variable

Setting the TERM variable in my ~/.zshrc restored 256 color support

export TERM=screen-256color