Terminal Setting to Facilitate VI in Mac OS X SSH Session

I was constantly annoyed by the fact that when I connected via SSH to a remote Unix server and tried to run VI or VIM, I would encounter the following message:

ex: 0602-108 xterm-color is not a recognized terminal type.
[Press return to continue]

After I acknowledge the error, VI would be essentially unusable.

Luckily for me, I was able to find a post from back in 2004 about the same issue on earlier versions of Mac.

"Setting terminal to be recognized for SSH."
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=19246

While the suggestion they had for creating the ~/.ssh/environment file did not work for me, setting TERM=vt100 before I ran ssh in Terminal did allow me to use VI properly in the SSH session.