On a clean install of Ubuntu 12.10, the default gnome-terminal is reporting $TERM to be xterm where it should really be reporting xterm-256color. What is the best way of changing this? I'm avoiding putting this in my .bashrc as that's just asking for trouble.
16
You were well advised not to change your startup scripts, specially ~/.bashrc. Any "terminal detection" using current $TERM or $COLORTERM in ~/.profile is merely a guess, and may, as you said, cause trouble when using other terminals (say, Putty or xterm). The terminal emulator is supposed to set $TERM, and this should not be changed from within the shell.
Gnome terminal, AFAIK, does not offer a configuration to change its TERM, but it does allow you to change your startup command, and that's all you need. Here is the trick:
Profile Preferences => Title and Command => Run a custom command instead of my shell
Then use the following command:
env TERM=xterm-256color /bin/bash
Just replace /bin/bash with your preferred shell if it's different. And no, you can't use "$SHELL" in that line for shell auto-detection ;) You have to hard-code it
12
For connecting with a terminal that's not able to do 256 colors.
It'd be far better to detect the terminal specifically with $COLORTERM. Look for gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, etc, and then set the $TERM variable to xterm-256color.
I do it with:
if [ "$COLORTERM" = "gnome-terminal" ] || [ "$COLORTERM" = "xfce4-terminal" ]
then
export TERM=xterm-256color
elif [ "$COLORTERM" = "rxvt-xpm" ]
then
export TERM=rxvt-256color
fi
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4Just be aware that Gnome Terminal from 3.13 onwards do not set
COLORTERManymore. – MestreLion Jan 29 '15 at 11:55 -
2
6
While it's true that terminfo has xterm+256color (/usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm+256color), termcap has just xterm (/usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm), so changing $TERM shouldn't be advisable.
Anyhow, $TERM is not set by gnome-terminal, but by vte. The default value for that environment variable can be changed either at compile time (giving an option to the configure script) or by calling the vte_pty_set_term() function. Looking at the sources of gnome-terminal, I see that vte_pty_set_term gets never called, so I can say that there are no ways to modify $TERM by editing gnome-terminal's settings.
What you have to do is to place the following piece of code in your ~/.profile:
if [ "$TERM" = "xterm" ]
then
export TERM=xterm-256color
fi
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==is a bash-only syntax, do not use it for snippets intended to be sourced bysh(which is the case with~/.profilein DEs). Also, the "x$.." syntax is not needed as you are correctly quoting the var expansion. – MestreLion Jan 28 '15 at 11:03 -
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I tried, but AU requires changes to be more than 6 chars, hence the comment – MestreLion Jan 28 '15 at 11:19
xtermis wrong because most applications won't work in 256-color mode unless it'sxterm-256colororscreen-256color(vim and tmux being the main ones I care about). Like @Freddy I would prefer not to set these in my shell profile, because I may be connecting from a different terminal type over SSH, and because it's really the terminal emulator's job to set this. I'm amazed that gnome-terminal doesn't provide multiple emulations. – Jim Stewart Mar 31 '13 at 2:48xterm-256colors. – egmont Apr 25 '15 at 23:39