[Techtalk] Changing the titlebar on an xterm

[Carol Williams]

I've always done something like this:

for the .kshrc
HOST=`hostname`
PS1='^[]0;${USER}{@${HOST}: ${PWD}^Gksh$ '

for the .bashrc
PS1="\[\033]0;\u@\h:  \w\007\]bash\\$  "


Carol Williams


On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:

> Does anybody (besides me) still use xterm?
>
> Silly little question: I used to have a shell alias to change the
> titlebar on the current xterm, so I could indicate which terminals
> were, for instance, ssh into a different machine.
>
> It went like this:
>
> titlebar2() {
>   echo -e "^]]2; $* ^G"
> }
>
> where ^] and ^G are the ESC and Ctrl-G characters, respectively.
>
> Though probably a better way to do this is
> titlebar2() {
>   echo -e "\033]2; $* \007"
> }
>
> Doesn't matter; neither one of them work any more. Apparently
> something changed in the xterm source some years back so that it no
> longer supports that control sequence. Every few years I google, but
> I always give up because every google search finds about a jillion
> ten-year-old pages telling me the way that used to work, and nothing
> about what changed or why.
>
> Anybody know a way to change an xterm's titlebar that works now,
> not ten years ago? Or the reason it stopped working?
>
> I've tried setting
> XTerm.allowTitleOps: true
> in .Xdefaults, and I've tried setting XTerm.utf8Title to both
> true and false, but it doesn't make any difference.
>
> I've also tried xtermset -T hello and xtermcontrol --title=hello.
> They don't work either.
>
> If it matters, this is on Debian (or Ubuntu), and this has been true
> for over five years so I doubt the xterm version is relevant, but
> the one I'm using right now is apparently version 278.
>
>         ...Akkana
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