Mate Terminal sets TERM to `xterm` thereby disabling vim color support

[Lucy Llewellyn]

Steps to reproduce:

open mate-terminal
$ sudo apt install vim
$ vim test.txt

Note that vim is in black and white only.

$ export TERM=xterm-256color
$ vim test.txt

Now vim is in glorious technicolor :-)

It seems that the TERM environment is set to a non-color mode by mate-terminal.

--
Note: I use the `dracula` theme for vim - my dotfiles are at github.com/diddledan/dotfiles if you want to duplicate my setup. I use vcsh and there are submodules for my vim plugins and theme so:

$ vcsh clone https://github.com/diddledan/dotfiles.git
$ vcsh dotfiles submodule init
$ vcsh dotfiles submodule update
--

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: mate-terminal 1.20.0-4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-20.21-generic 4.15.17
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-20-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: MATE
Date: Tue May 1 17:15:53 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-04-27 (3 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-MATE 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180426)
SourcePackage: mate-terminal
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Alexander Browne (elcste)]

Is this maybe related to this upstream bug https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-terminal/issues/209 ?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

This was fixed in mate-terminal 1.24 introduced in Ubuntu MATE 20.04.