Suggestion: Give CRT a way for programs to differentiate it from more "standard" looking terminals.

[LunarLambda]

One way would be to have /usr/share/terminfo/c/cool-retro-term be a link to /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm, and set TERM to cool-retro-term, or to keep TERM as-is and export a different variable, like COOL_RETRO_TERM, containing a version number or something else.

The reason for this is that there is no easy way for programs (like Vim) to determine what terminal I'm running in beyond checking $TERM. Since CRT is visually quite different from pretty much any other terminal emulator out there, it would be nice to be have a little if statement in my setups to pick different visual styling for it. Since, for example, using solarized light in vim might look fine in a standard xterm, but would probably not work at all in CRT, since it's a very bright colorscheme.

[SilverWolf32]

There's actually a $TERM_PROGRAM environment variable designed for just this sort of thing, and it seems to be becoming a sort-of-standard! Apple's built-in Terminal.app sets it to "Apple_Terminal", while iTerm 2 sets it to "iTerm.app". GNOME Terminal sets it to "gnome-terminal". CRT currently leaves it blank. There's even a $TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION too, if you really want to get specific!

[SilverWolf32]

Currently as an interim stopgap measure I'm detecting it as $TERM="xterm", since every other terminal I use happens to have 256 color support and sets it to "xterm-256color", but that may not work for you. And of course it might mess you up if you want to log into Linux VT consoles.

[jwbrase]

One thing you could do is set TERM to vt100. That suppresses color in vim, though, oddly, not for "ls --color=auto".

[SilverWolf32]

Wouldn't that mess up keys and escape sequences as well, though?

[jphebus]

The standard seems to be for a terminal emulator that supports 256 colors to append -256color to its TERM identification string, like xterm-256color or rxvt-unicode-256color. So, I would recommend identifying as cool-retro-term-256color. However, Cool Retro Term would need its own terminfo entry under /etc/terminfo or /lib/terminfo to describe its capabilities. This would be the correct long-term solution, I think.

As a short-term fix, so that Bash, Vim, Mutt, etc. would realize that Cool Retro Term supports 256 colors, I added the following to my .bashrc file (near the beginning):

# Cool Retro Term doesn't properly identify as a 256 color terminal.
# Force it to identify as xterm-256color instead of just xterm.
[ -z "$COLORSCHEMES_DIR" ] || export TERM='xterm-256color'

This works because Cool Retro Term sets a COLORSCHEMES_DIR environment variable that can be detected. But, this is a pretty clunky workaround.

[SilverWolf32]

CRT doesn't just support 256 colors (as identified by xterm-256color). It also supports full-on 24-bit color! (e.g. #rrggbb)

Terminal-wise – keys and such – it's an xterm as far as I know, so we shouldn't need to do anything with $TERM beyond setting it to xterm-256color. But having a $TERM_PROGRAM set would be nice, so we can have a different theme for bright glowy CRT (as mentioned in the OP).

There's also apparently a $COLORTERM variable, which gnome-terminal sets to truecolor, and iTerm 2 sets to something (I can't remember exactly what). That would be good for 24-bit color detection.