Re: Extending the panel

[hobbit aloss ukuu org uk]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 01:08:39AM -0500 or thereabouts, Seth Nickell wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 04:48, hobbit aloss ukuu org uk wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 10:02:10PM -0700 or thereabouts, Alan wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2002-07-31 at 08:14, Michael Petnuch wrote:
> > > In some cases yes... however, a lot of times a snapshot of say, a
> > > terminal window is a heck of a lot more helpful than a list of windows
> > > all called "Terminal".  Being able to see if it's a window with code in
> > > it, or your mail session, or [random whatever] can be quite an asset.
> > 
> > Playing with the current RH beta, I found that gnome-terminal in 
> > Gnome 2.0 lets you set the titlebar on the fly. 
> > 
> > There's no GUI for this in 1.x, but it's one line in bash. Well, 
> > two if you include #!/bin/bash :) 
> > 
> > So if you use titles like "Mail", "Emacs", "Lynx", "CVS", and so
> > on, you don't need pictures. 
> 
> In the real world I almost never see people actually doing this. I
> suppose people find it to bothersome. Terminals are really rather broken

I do. Me, me, me! 

> this way. It would have been nice to go back to when the specs were
> being made and get support for
> getting-out-a-sensible-window-title-to-the-terminal. I suppose its not
> to late to change bash and such to at least show the directory name you
> are in when on the shell?

The "name machine:/path/to/cwd" thing you get in the titlebar on 
some Linux distros is just environment variables: specifically it's 
the PROMPT_COMMAND one and the xterm control sequences. In fact, you 
have to unset that PROMPT_COMMAND first if you want to change the 
titlebar on the fly yourself, or it will get re-written as soon as
your prompt appears. To change it yourself:

$ cat Scripts/titlebar.sh
#!/bin/sh

# How to make your xterm, gnome-terminal, etc, have a new title if
# you didn't start it with xterm --title or gnome-terminal --title.
#
# $* is "whatever you typed as an argument when you ran the script"
# So 'titlebar.sh Horace' gives you a window called Horace.

printf "\033]0;$*\007"
echo "Changed window title to $*"

True UNIX people will want to remove the second line as unnecessary
feedback, of course :) 

Wow. What a sidetrack. We now return you to the issue of whether 
the panel should show little pictures of what's in a terminal or
not.

Telsa