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.
Workaround: change the launch command for gnome-terminal to run the following script: #!/usr/bin/sh COLORTERM="gnome" exec ${SHELL}
See bug 1166428 & bug 1165439.
(Also see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733423 for the rationale behind dropping it.)
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.