Comment 47 for bug 1599453

Waaaahhh! My head's beginning to spin a bit. It all works exactly how I'd expect now at my end. Pull the last commit I just did, just to be sure we're in sync.

There /should/ be no "cross-talk" for want of a better phrase between Terminator and GNOME-Terminal. They are loading different files entirely. But yes, I can also use that value, which is very odd unless there is some kind of shared global defined color cache. I really don't know enough about how this all hangs together to make a comment on that. But for now, let's not add CSS in the debugger. It's good for figuring out the structure, but we can't directly use those rules anyway, because different people have different system colours. (In particular that @terminal_bg has no alpha.)

Just so we're clear... You are not running terminator from within terminator, right? Because this will cause issues. Terminator runs as a daemon now by default, to reduce resource usage, so the new launch of terminator will ask the original launch to open a new window. This can mean you thinking you are running new code, but in fact you're not. This can be very confusing, esp. if you run the system installed software that doesn't have a bunch of fixes, and then try to test them. You either need to disable DBus, or run terminator with the -u flag to avoid this problem.

Either way, set your default profile to use the system colors, then quit all instances of terminator. Apply the attached diff.

Use gnome-terminal or similar to run terminator (debug/inspection is not necessary). You should see three lines of output like this:
During terminator reconfigure: #ffffff
During terminator reconfigure: #ffffff
During terminal reconfigure: #ffffff

Can you post yours back?