Tmux doesn't work over ssh if TERM=xterm-kitty

[toonn]

I’m trying to track down an issue. Here’s the situation, using the kitty terminal emulator I can start tmux locally without problems. I can ssh to another box without problems but I can’t start tmux there, it reports the following error: `open terminal failed: missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-kitty`.

It works fine (afaict) if I run `env TERM=xterm-256color tmux` instead.

I reported this to the kitty maintainer here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1241

He pointed me to the tmux tracker where there’s a similar issue: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1433

Which is also closed pointing to ncurses as the culprit but that was reported on the ubuntu issue tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ncurses/+bug/1786617

I found a previous thread that could be related: Request for inclusion of new xterm-kitty terminfo

All of these issues are closed, note that the second and third describe a silghtly different scenario where the tmux server has already been started with a different environment. The mailing list thread seems to be about inclusion of the kitty terminfo in ncurses, which doesn’t apply to my issue since I have the terminfo files available on both client and server. My question is, how do I solve the problem? It seems like a hot potato that no one wants to deal with but as a user I don’t know enough about terminfo to solve it.