Couldn't we enable 256 colors by default on TERM?

[Thomas Moschny]

2012/6/26 Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>:
> The newer terminal
> programs have configuration menus for various things; do any of them set
> it there?  If they don't, I would think it would be relatively easy to
> add (and hopefully upstreams would accept such patches).

Tried with XFCE's "Terminal", which has a $TERM option in its
configuration dialog (under advanced options), but it simply doesn't
work. I set it to "xterm-256color", but within the shell, TERM is
still "xterm".

Not sure whether that is an XFCE (or vte) bug, or whether some
system-wide profile script overrides it. Afaict, none of my user
profile scripts overrides it.

- Thomas