Ubuntu – Change environment variable (TERM)

environment-variablesterminator

According to this answer, "it is the job of the terminal emulator to set the TERM environment variable".

Is there any way to change the TERM value used by Terminator? Right now it's xterm, but I need xterm-256color.

I use other terminal emulators (Gnome Terminator, tmux), so setting in my .bashrc would be messy at best.

Best Answer

The way I do it is using a custom_command in ~/.config/terminator/config as follows:

...
[profiles]
  [[default]]
    ...
    custom_command = TERM=xterm-256color bash -l # Do not use 'terminator' here
    use_custom_command = True
    ...

This works like a charm i.e. for the 256-color skins for midnight commander. The -l option makes bash run as a login shell (which means that it will load settings from your .bash_profile). You can omit it if you prefer Terminator to launch bash as a non-login shell (so that it will load .bashrc instead).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Terminal emulator left-click to open link

urxvt is probably the single most configurable emulator out there. Install it with

sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Then edit the ~/.Xdefaults file adding the following:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: xdg-open
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-\[\]]*[\\w/-]

Using xdg-open allows you to use whatever browser you have specified in system settings (works for Gnome at least, unsure about KDE). Unfortunately, the default looks of urxvt are not, shall I say, very convincing, it's more like the old xterm than the modern gnome-terminal, and the configuration runs through config files rather than context menus. There is a tutorial on how to configure it, however.

Personally, I don't mind such configuration mode, in my experience you rarely want to reconfigure your terminal.

Ubuntu – Change default shell for Terminator

Use `chsh` to change shell

You can use chsh to change your default shell. Running this command will ask for complete path of the shell.

You can also run

chsh -s <path_to_shell>

to change the shell directly.

Change Terminator Preferences

You can also change the Terminator preferences directly.

Open Terminator.
Right Click on Terminator and select Preferences.
Go to Profiles > Command.
Check Run command as login shell, Run a custom command instead of my shell, and type in the address of the shell.

enter image description here - Close the dialog box.