How do I get the name of the current terminal in Vim?

Question

I'm currently running Vim in Windows 10. I want to specify in my config file certain settings for when I'm running Vim in Cmder, different settings when I'm running Vim in Alacritty, etc.

When in Cmder, if I run echo &term I get win32, and when I run echo $term I get cygwin. What's the difference between $term and &term, and are these the only ways I can access the name of the terminal? Are one of those correct? The shell I'm running in Cmder is cmd with Cmder's clink configurations.

Answer 1

Regarding the two variables:

• $term is a variable from the environment. When you are on the terminal (without opening Vim), echo $term should echo the same as :echo $term from inside Vim. (I'm a little bit surprised that it is not upper case, like $TERM.)
• &term represents the option term (see :h 'term'). So the output from :echo &term is the same as the output from :set term?.

If you need some information about the world outside of Vim you can check environment variables (like $TERM).

In both of your terminal run the command set to list all environment variables with their values and find a variable that has a different value per terminal. Or a variable that is set in one terminal, but not the other.

By just looking at the Cmder web sites I guess it could be something like this:

if $CMDER_ROOT != ''
   " do CMDER stuff here
else
   " do other stuff here
fi

Answer 2

In my macOS system, the unique name of the terminal program is set in environment variable TERM_PROGRAM. Apple's inbuilt Terminal, iTerm2, WezTerm return sensible unique names that correctly identify them. As of writing this, Alcritty does not set it to any value, and Kitty terminal emulator returns wrong name "Apple_Terminal".

Run echo $TERM_PROGRAM in your system to see if it works there as well.