It seems that tmux-2.1 (released 18 October 2015) now allows the colours of individual panes to be specified. From the changelog:

* 'select-pane' now understands '-P' to set window/pane background colours.

e.g. [from the manual] to change pane 1's foreground (text) to blue and background to red use:

select-pane -t:.1 -P 'fg=blue,bg=red'

To mimic iTerm colour scheme:

To answer the original question, I use the following lines in my ~/.tmux.conf for setting the background/foreground colours to mimic the behaviour in iTerm:

#set inactive/active window styles set -g window-style 'fg=colour247,bg=colour236' set -g window-active-style 'fg=colour250,bg=black' # set the pane border colors set -g pane-border-style 'fg=colour235,bg=colour238' set -g pane-active-border-style 'fg=colour51,bg=colour236'

I hadn't seen the window-style and window-active-style commands before, but maybe they were available in previous tmux versions.

Also, these two lines are pretty useful for splitting panes easily:

bind | split-window -h bind - split-window -v

EDIT: as Jamie Schembri mentions in the comments, tmux version 2.1 (at least) will now be installed with:

brew install tmux

EDIT (Oct 2017): brew now installs tmux 2.6, and the above still works.

EDIT Vim panes: If you find that the "inactive colouring" does not work with a Vim pane, it might be due to the colourscheme you are using. Try with the pablo scheme; i.e. in the Vim pane:

:colo pablo

To make it work with your own custom Vim colourscheme, make sure that the setting for Normal highlighting does not have ctermbg or guibg specified. As an example, the "inactive colouring" does not work with the murphy colourscheme, because in murphy.vim there is the line:

hi Normal ctermbg=Black ctermfg=lightgreen guibg=Black guifg=lightgreen

that sets ctermbg or guibg to Black . However, changing this line to:

hi Normal ctermfg=lightgreen guifg=lightgreen

will make the "inactive colouring" work.

EDIT July 2019 Augusto provided a good suggestion for also changing the background colour for the line numbers. What I use in my vim colourscheme is the following: