tmux and screen-256 TERM not supported on remote hosts

Question

I have set up my tmux to use screen-256colors and it works great with vim.

However, when I ssh to a remote host from within tmux, screen-256colors isn't recognized, so I'm getting errors like this:

E558: Terminal entry not found in terminfo 'screen-256color' not known. Available builtin terminals are:
    builtin_ansi
    builtin_xterm
    builtin_iris-ansi
    builtin_dumb defaulting to 'ansi'

Other than editing each remote .bashrc (similarly to this suggestion), is there any way to set the TERM correctly and automatically on the remote host?

Answer 1

You can copy the necessary terminfo descriptions to remote hosts.

1. On the local system, dump the description to text format:

   infocmp xterm-256color > xterm-256color.ti
   infocmp screen-256color > screen-256color.ti
   

2. Copy to the remote host and compile:

   tic xterm-256color.ti
   tic screen-256color.ti
   

The descriptions will be stored in ~/.terminfo.

(infocmp and tic are part of the ncurses or ncurses-bin packages in most Linux distributions, as well as most BSDs that use ncurses.)

Answer 2

I have this in my .bashrc:

alias ssh='TERM=screen ssh'