Terminal emacs colors only work with TERM=xterm-256color

Question

I\'ve found that terminal emacs does not render the correct colors unless I explicitly set TERM=xterm-256color. I use gnome-terminal, and from what I understand, TERM should

Answer 1

On ubuntu 10.04 I too had noticed that running emacs -nw inside byobu/tmux/screen was using different colours from emacs -nw in the regular gnome-terminal.

I found that this is because byobu was setting TERM to screen-bce. Then setting TERM to xterm (for me, in the normal gnome-terminal TERM=xterm) gave me the same syntax highlighting when not running through byobu/screen.

So still not sure what the proper solution is.

See also this post: Emacs Python-mode syntax highlighting