I use pywal with the variety wallpaper changer to automatically change the color scheme of urxvt. I have all this happening in the background and set to a one hour interval. I also have a hot key assigned in my i3 config file so that i can make all this happen whenever I like as well. This all really cool, and I will probably submit a post one day explaining all that in case anyone is interested, but having a terminal color scheme that changes based on the colors in your wallpaper on an hourly basis can wreak havoc sometimes; stuff like syntax highlighting in vim, and tmux status bars can sometimes become hard to read when the colors switch to a less than ideal scheme.

While I have not taken the time to fix the issue with vim, as I don’t always use syntax highlighting, I have fixed the issue with tmux. As an aside, I was a GNU screen user for many years, but switched to tmux 4 or 5 years ago. Anyway, back to tmux, the issue I was having was that the status bar in tmux would change to a color scheme that would sometimes make the window names difficult to read.

The solution I stumbled upon was a one line addition to my .tmux.conf file:

setw -g window-status-current-style bg=black,fg=white,bright

This fixed the issue completely, and additionally (with the fg set to white, bright) makes the current window the most easily read.

tmux status bar

While this is most definitely a self-inflicted problem, as I don’t really need to have the color scheme based on the current wallpaper, and have it change hourly, I do like the variety, and I am glad I have found a workaround.

-dsyates

(o\_!_/o)