Why is TERM environment variable set to vt102?

[pinsrw]

Hi all,

Anybody know why Apple has hobbled the Terminal program by setting the environment variable TERM to vt102? Also they didn't set CLICOLOR by default, so the output of 'ls' is not colorized. Seems like they went to an effort to make the Terminal experience boring...

 

[MacVibe]

Hi all,

Anybody know why Apple has hobbled the Terminal program by setting the environment variable TERM to vt102? Also they didn't set CLICOLOR by default, so the output of 'ls' is not colorized. Seems like they went to an effort to make the Terminal experience boring...

I agree completely. There are a lot of slick UI features in OS X and terminal is as plain as it gets. I suspect it is an extremely low priority for Apple and they figure the people that care can figure out customizations.

 

[mrichmon]

Anybody know why Apple has hobbled the Terminal program by setting the environment variable TERM to vt102? Also they didn't set CLICOLOR by default, so the output of 'ls' is not colorized. Seems like they went to an effort to make the Terminal experience boring...

Probably some combination of:

1. Apple is aware that there are UN*X systems in the world other than click-and-drool Linux distributions. (Some of them are not even Linux!!!)
2. OpenStep 4.2 defaulted to a TERM=vt100. It's quite possible that 4.3 updated to vt102 and noone has cared to change the default since.
3. TERM=[vt100|vt102] default values are the most common "sane" terminal value for vanilla behaviour. (See 1 & 2.)
4. Apple is aware that anybody who should be messing around in the terminal who cares will set the value themselves. Either manually as needed, or in their favorite shell rc file.
5. Apple is aware that the default for the TERM environment variable has nothing to do with the "Terminal" application.

For what it's worth, Rhapsody DR2 used a default TERM of "d0". Thankfully that seems to have died with Rhapsody.

On my clean test system installed with 10.6.7 the default is "xterm-color" but that may have been affected by installing X11.