I'm trying to get the solarized color scheme in my terminal and am working through some tutorials online. I have run across the $TERM environment variable that from my understanding is the current name of the terminal I'm using. I also have a $COLORTERM which I'm not quite sure what it is but it shows me: gnome-terminal
whereas the $TERM variable is xterm
. Isn't the terminal that Ubuntu 13.10 uses the gnome-terminal? Why is xterm being displayed in the env var?
Ubuntu – Does gnome-terminal $TERM display xterm
13.10colorsgnome-terminalxterm
Best Answer
It has the same reason why almost every webbrowser (FF,IE,Safari,Chrome,...) uses Mozilla in their User Agent String.
The
TERM
variable set toxterm
only means that your terminal is compatible with thexterm
terminal (has the same capabilities), so the system can treat it and communicate with it as it would with anxterm
. The system has theterminfo
database which stores the terminal capabilities for various terminals (/lib/terminfo
directory), and in that terminfo database there is no such asgnome-terminal
.For some more info look at this answer or look up the manpages of
terminfo
orinfocmp