Introduction

In this post the main objective is to get the Terminal used in Mac OS X works with expected behavior as oppsed to the erratic behavior that it normally does. The cause of this erratic behavior is caused by the terminal type that Apple Terminal defines itself as. Luckily in Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple has fixed the issue by creating profiles.

Setting The Required Variables

Mac OS X

Here is an example of my Mac OS X Client running the default terminal profile.

[rvalente]:[~]% uname -a
Darwin poseidon 9.0.0b5 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0b5:
Tue  Sep 18 20:47:38 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1207~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Default Mac OS X Terminal Type

[rvalente]:[~]% echo $TERM
xterm-color

My Custom Terminal Type

[rvalente]:[~]% echo $TERM
vt100

Solaris

Here is an example of my Solaris Server. It is running Solaris 10 08/07

[rvalente]:[~]% uname -a 
SunOS zeus 5.10 Generic_127112-01 i86pc i386 i86pc

Solaris ZSHRC Configuration File

Here is my .zshrc on my solaris server to match the TERM variable with my Apple Terminal profile.

[rvalente]:[~]% cat .zshrc 
limit stack 8192
limit core 0
limit -s

umask 022

export HISTSIZE=1000
export SAVEHIST=1000
export HISTFILE=~/.history
export PS1='[%n]:[%~]%# '
export TERM=vt100

setopt autocd
setopt nobeep

source ~/.aliases

As you can see below that once that .zshrc is loaded when the login shell is started the correct value is set to the variable TERM.

[rvalente]:[~]% echo $TERM
vt100

Setting up your local profile (with pictures)

Open ther Terminal menu and select Preferences… menu. Select you current profile or create a new profile and set the following options as displayed in the picture below.