I've just found a link to this ancient bugreport in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code.
Unfortunately this discussion here contains two confusing mistakes. I'd like to correct them for future reference purposes. No action necessary, other than perhaps closing this bug, and fixing the Wiki page (I might do the latter). In comment #1 I was mistakenly talking about the COLOR*FGBG* variable, not about COLOR*TERM*. This can be seen by the link pointing to an issue that actually (correctly) talks about COLORFGBG, and from my words over here not making any sense. I probably made the same mistake in #4 too (but I'm not sure). I must have had that other environment variable in mind and talked about that, incorrectly typing the name of the one this bugreport was talking about, not realizing the difference. My bad, apologies for this mistake. (I'm not editing the earlier posts here because then the thread will make even less sense.) COLORTERM used to be set to the terminal emulator's name, "gnome- terminal" in our case. This was removed from GNOME Terminal version 3.14, released in 2014, the commit is linked from comment #2 here. This version of GNOME Terminal (or rather, the corresponding VTE version) also implemented truecolor support. Around this time the de facto use of this environment variable across various terminal emulators shifted for it to contain the "truecolor" string if the emulator supported this feature. So VTE 0.44, corresponding to GNOME Terminal 3.20, released in 2016 brought back this environment variable with the new value in https://github.com/GNOME/vte/commit/1dea919b9aa4b55e2c5c07bf2022769cbac365b5. Since the setting now occurs in VTE rather than GNOME Terminal, it is set in all VTE-based emulators. It has stayed ever since and is likely to stay as long as this variable is in widespread use. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-terminal in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1429584 Title: gnome-terminal doesn't set $COLORTERM from 3.14 onwards Status in gnome-terminal package in Ubuntu: Opinion Bug description: Gnome terminal has dropped the $COLORTERM workaround for invalid terminfo/termcap. References: https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-terminal/commit/1d5c1b6ca6373c1301494edbc9e43c3e6a9c9aaf https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1165439 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1173688 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1166428 This affects release: Vivid Vervet Workaround I currently use is `.bashrc`: if [ -z "$COLORTERM" ] && cat /proc/$PPID/exe 2> /dev/null | grep -q gnome-terminal; then export COLORTERM=gnome-terminal fi To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1429584/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
