3.5 Running on screen

screen will adapt ANSI colour escape sequences to your terminal’s capabilities. This means that if your terminal reports itself as xterm in $TERM ponies will lose their colours; they will only use the lower 16 colours instead of the top 240 colours. By default, almost all X terminals, including xterm and mate-terminal reports themselves as xterm in $TERM, and some reports their actual name in $COLORTERM. So before opening screen you use set $TERM to xterm-256color, if you are using a terminal with support for xterm’s 256 colours; this can be done by adding to your ~/.bashrc:

[ "$TERM" = "xterm" ] &&
    function screen
    {   export TERM="xterm-256color"
        exec screen "$@"
    }