Comment 1 for bug 1340542

Terminator can set the initial environment of your shell, but there's no way it could alter it later on a profile change. So your suggested approach couldn't work.

If Terminator finally upgraded to a newer VTE (bug 1030562), you could use "xtermcontrol --get-bg" or similar command to query the current colors (see also https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733423), this would allow you to script vim as you desire.