On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 at 14:31:01 +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
What about sensible-terminal ?
That's closer (it at least has a mechanism for per-desktop defaults),
but has the disadvantage of being Debian-specific, and its per-user
configuration is by creating new tool-specific environment variables.
A non-Debian-specific settings UI like gnome-control-center or KDE's
systemsettings isn't going to be able to configure this in the expected
way for several reasons:
- there isn't a particularly good universal way to set environment
variables for the session: environment.d(5) is the closest, but is
systemd-specific as far as I know
- because of how environment variable inheritance works, changing an
environment variable in environment.d(5) won't take effect until the
user logs out and back in (and perhaps not even then, if session
lingering is enabled)
- the non-Debian-specific settings UIs typically won't want to include
code for a Debian-specific setting, and desktop teams with limited
resources would prefer not to patch new logic into a fork of those UIs
I still think xdg-terminal-exec is the closest thing we have to a good
way to choose an appropriate terminal.
Coming back to the topic of wayland-terminal-emulator, sensible-terminal
has the same limitation as xdg-terminal-exec that it assumes all
terminals are capable of running in any desktop session (Wayland or
X11), which is true for typical X11/Wayland terminals like ptyxis and
konsole, and also true for X11-only terminals like xterm, but not true
for Wayland-only terminals like foot.
smcv
