Starting tmux over SSH on olimex with kitty term

February 7, 2024 - 1 min read

Problem

I wanted to connect to my olimex from my arch linux desktop. ssh is working nicely but after sshing in I could not tmux as xterm-kitty (my terminal is kitty) is not recognized.

olimex@a64-olinuxino:~$ tmux
missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-kitty

Solution

The solution was to set my local arch TERM variable to something more universally compatible. ChatGPT suggested xterm-256color. I could do something like this and put together a script in my ~/bin folder:

#!/bin/bash
export TERM=xterm-256color
ssh olimex

This would be my default approach but ChatGPT made the suggestion of putting it in an alias in my ~/.bashrc. I don’t know why, but this is something I never considered. And to be honest, I quite like it. For scripts that are extremely small it makes sense to have an alias instead of a full blown script in my custom bin folder.

Implementing the Solution

Implementing the solution is as simple as adding this alias to my ~/.bashrc

alias ssholimex='export TERM=xterm-256color; ssh olimex'

For completeness I also added an entry to my ~/.ssh/config file:

Host olimex
    HostName 192.168.###.###
    User olimex
    SendEnv TERM