How to replace xterm with another terminal emulator?

[tim77]

In Fedora there is not such thing as Debian upgrade-alternative. If xterm not installed on system then apps like htop with Terminal=true in the desktop file wont run even if there alternative terminal emulators installed on system.

[gijsbers]

It is not precisely stated in your description in which sense IceWM is lacking. Is there a freedesktop standard not implemented? What is your proposed solution exactly? Which features of IceWM are involved and in what order?

[Code7R]

+1. Who is supposed to solve it? Either Integrator (Fedora) or the user (maybe by creating a script which looks for the correct executable or so. You can inject the name of the script with XTERMCMD define in the compiler flags, e.g. via CXXFLAGS environment).

[Thyname]

The issue here actually is the menu generator. @tim77 since we intend to use xde-menu, there's no way to avoid that as it translates 'Terminal=true' in the .desktop file to an xterm command. See: https://github.com/bbidulock/xde-menu/blob/master/src/xde-menu.c#L1180

What you could do for the Fedora package is maybe the same way you made a font settings optional package for icewm, one day you may make a xterm tweak package for it too (I think xterm can look modern if properly tweaked).

Regarding icewm code, actually icewm-menu-fdo uses XTERMCMD variable that is set to 'xterm' in appnames.h. See: https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm/blob/icewm-1-4-BRANCH/src/fdomenu.cc#L430 https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm/blob/icewm-1-4-BRANCH/src/appnames.h#L44

So yes, maybe some day icewm could check other terminal emulators like GNOME does in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/blob/master/gio/gdesktopappinfo.c#L2520 but then that may or may not be bloat and we're all against bloat ;-)

But this could be a valuable improvement to xde-menu, so I suggest we open an enhancement request there.

[gijsbers]

There is xdg-terminal. I see some use update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator. And gnome has:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec /usr/bin/terminator
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec-arg "-x"

Here is some ordering of terminals:

    1 /usr/bin/xterm
    2 /usr/bin/uxterm
    3 /usr/bin/koi8rxterm
    4 /usr/bin/lxterm
    5 /usr/bin/gnome-terminal
    6 /usr/bin/konsole
    7 /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal.wrapper

I added --with-xterm= and -DXTERMCMD= to the build process for you. You could set it to /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator or define your own xterm script?

The default IceWM preferences also use xterm in several places. These may need to become definable at build time as well.

[tim77]

@gijsbers that https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm/commit/dd021701f73c76b539fd334edebec3c218daa30a could be consider as solution indeed, thank you. But it would be much better if we made possible to change default terminal dynamically, maybe write a script for this as you already mentioned.

1. I could close this issue since it mostly fixed and open new one about dynamic terminal replacement.
2. Or we can continue discuss this there.

[gijsbers]

You can always decide to close an issue if you want. It is okay to continue a discussion on a closed issue. A closed issue can also be reopened later. A new feature request deserves a new issue.