Bug 1173688

Summary: Gnome-terminal no longer sets $COLORTERM
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Tom Johnson <tiddlydum>
Component: gnome-terminalAssignee: Matthias Clasen <mclasen>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
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Priority: unspecified    
Version: 21CC: debarshir, egmont, mclasen, zeenix
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OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2015-09-16 12:59:13 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Tom Johnson 2014-12-12 16:40:32 UTC 
Description of problem:
Gnome-terminal no longer sets the $COLORTERM environment variable, which means the 256-colour terminal detection (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/256_Color_Terminals) no longer works for it, thus $TERM is set to "xterm" instead of "xterm-256color".

This causes terminal-aware applications (vim, for example) to fall back to 8-colour mode.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
3.14.2

How reproducible:


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a new gnome-terminal session
2. echo $COLORTERM
3. echo $TERM

Actual results:
$ echo $COLORTERM

$ echo $TERM
xterm

Expected results:
$ echo $COLORTERM
gnome
$ echo $TERM
xterm-256color

Additional info:
No other environment variables are set identifying gnome-terminal as the terminal emulator, so a conditional $TERM set in the bashrc isn't possible.
Comment 1 Tom Johnson 2014-12-12 16:49:02 UTC 
Workaround: change the launch command for gnome-terminal to run the following script:

#!/usr/bin/sh
COLORTERM="gnome" exec ${SHELL}
Comment 2 Egmont Koblinger 2014-12-13 19:30:33 UTC 
See bug 1166428 & bug 1165439.
Comment 3 Egmont Koblinger 2015-03-09 14:19:44 UTC 
(Also see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733423 for the rationale behind dropping it.)
Comment 4 Debarshi Ray 2015-09-16 12:59:13 UTC 
This is the upstream commit that stopped setting COLORTERM:

commit 1d5c1b6ca6373c1301494edbc9e43c3e6a9c9aaf
Author: Christian Persch <chpe>
Date:   Sat Apr 26 19:13:21 2014 +0200

    screen: Stop setting COLORTERM env var
    
    COLORTERM is a long-obsolete slang-only variable used to work around
    broken termcap/terminfo entries.