Re: Denoting Remote Machines (Re: Custom Icons for GNOME Terminal Profiles)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 15:54 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 11:47:45 +0800
> > From: Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>
> > To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> > Subject: Re: Denoting Remote Machines (Re: Custom Icons for GNOME
> >     Terminal Profiles)
> >
> > On Sat, 2005-11-19 at 19:41 +0000, Alan Horkan wrote:
> >
> > > > Unrelated, but this has reminded me of a feature I saw recently in
> > > > KWin.
> > > >
> > > > Remote X clients running on your X server are marked with an
> > > > @hostname in the title.
> > >
> > > That information can also be shown by configuring your command line
> > > prompt.
> > >
> > > Might be easier to allow the terminal to use whatever you have set as your
> > > prompt as the window title, as it might provide a relatively easy way to
> > > tap into a lot of existing infrastructure without further complicating
> > > things.
> >
> > I'm not quite sure what you mean here.
> 
> Sorry
> 
> > You can set the title of an xterm or gnome-terminal by sending the magic
> > escape sequence, many distributions have this in their bashrc files and
> > what have you.
> 
> You can set the window title to a fixed value (as far as I can tell it is
> fixed)
> 
> As I'm sure you know one can set the command prompt to show
> 
> username host /path/directory/ ~
> 
> and presumably one can configure the command prompt to show all kinds of
> other variables and other useful information which is kept up to date even
> if you change directories or log into other (similarly configured) hosts.
> (On the network I am using this is already provided and I do always know
> what host I'm currently logged in to.)

To clear things up, there are two things being talked about here:
First, changing the title of a gnome-terminal window based on some
information, possibly the host you've logged into with your shell.
And second, changing the title of any random window, based on which
machine that window is actually running on.

If you're running a gnome-terminal on your machine, and you happen
to be logged into a remote machine with your shell, the terminal is
still running on the local machine.  As far as a window manager is
concerned, it's a local window.  Some people are discussing having
the window manager automatically append the hostname to any window
running on a remote machine.

As for setting the title of a gnome-terminal window based on what
machine you're logged into (or what directory you're in, or how
many suspended tasks you have, or whatever else), you can do this
in your shell's rc file, just as you can set your prompt.  Notice
that the profile preferences in gnome-terminal allow you to set
what to do with dynamically-set titles.  These are titles that
are set by the shell using xterm escape sequences.

Here's a nice explanation of how to set your terminal's window
title from the shell:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Xterm-Title.html#s3

--
Shaun