Fixing Italics Rendering on Mac

Solution: for local Mac installation and integration with iTerm2, we need to create a file named xterm-256color-italic.terminfo with the following contents:

# A xterm-256color based TERMINFO that adds the escape sequences for italic.
xterm-256color-italic|xterm with 256 colors and italic,
  sitm=\E[3m, ritm=\E[23m,
  use=xterm-256color,

This file can be placed anywhere, and once it’s created, run tic xterm-256color-italic.terminfo for the file to be processed properly (not exactly sure what this does but I don’t really care). You can then go to iTerm2 and change the Report Terminal Type: xterm-256color-italic.terminfo. This solved all of my issues, enabling in-file comment italics and Markdown italics to show properly. If you face problems like this in the future, consider referencing this article, or this SO post.

Also: the above article is awesome. It helped me fix the following issue. I figured the local terminal configuration would apply even after SSHing into my cloud server. Turns out this is not true; iTerm2 (or some lower level process) is referencing those settings processed by tic on the current machine; that is, if I’m opening Vim on my Mac it’s expected a registry entry on the Mac, if I’m sshed into my server it’s expected a local registry on that machine. Repeating the above procedure for creating the xterm-256color-italic file on the server allows me to reproduce everything I saw locally.