Vim is missing colors in MinGW when using mintty

For some weeks I had to cope with a monochrome vim in MSYS/MinGW, which turned out to be a really horrible experience to be honest and I avoided vim as often as I could. Searching on the web did not help much, therefore I want to share the little thing with you

The problem was that I was setting the TERM system environment variable in mintty (using the settings in the upper left corner) to xterm-256colors.

The solution was to reset the TERM system environment variable to xterm.

The colors instantly came back I was able to use my full dotfiles repository (except for UltiSnips due to the dependency on python) in MinGW - I seem to have a working system again after all this time…

That’s it, cheers!
iss