Claude draws the user's own messages as a block of background color, and
inside a Codeman pane that block was invisible. tmux hands each pane
TERM=screen, which supports-color reads as 16 colors, and Claude's registry
entry deleted COLORTERM on top of that. Claude therefore quantized every RGB
color its theme asked for down to the basic palette, where rgb(55, 55, 55)
and every other dark background becomes ESC[40m, the terminal's own black.
Changing the color in a custom Claude theme moved nothing on screen.
Claude now exports COLORTERM=truecolor and unsets NO_COLOR, matching codex,
gemini, antigravity, pi, grok and omp. CLAUDECODE stays unset, because Claude
reads it as a signal that it is running nested inside itself. Both the tmux
session and the attach client read this one registry entry, so they cannot
disagree.
PR #3 introduced the unset in February, citing xterm.js#484 for the claim
that xterm.js mishandles truecolor. xterm.js closed that issue in April 2019,
Codeman now depends on @xterm/xterm 6, and TmuxManager already sets
terminal-overrides ",*:Tc" on its own tmux server, so 24-bit color reaches
the browser today for every CLI that asks for it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
