There is some old magic concerning this that I have mostly forgotten. But as you probably are aware, the title of the window (and all the decoration around the windows contents) is in fact rendered by the window manager. So when an X application starts, it informs the window manager what it would like it's title to be (and how big it needs the windows,etc). These "hints" can often be ignored by the window manager if it sees fit. There is also some messaging/APIs that allow one to dynamically communicate with the window manager (ICCCM is the old one and it looks like EWMH is something new.) I can remember hacking some C code for X way back in the early nineties' that did things like this with the window manager. Googling though, I found two ready-made command line utilities that look useful xtitle - http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~kinzler/xtitle/ wmctl - http://sweb.cz/tripie/utils/wmctrl/ wmctl looks pretty powerful if you want to be able script a whole lot of things that your window manager should do. (Clearly as already been said, you will probably need to disable/change the dynamic prompt stuff in .bashrc) Interestingly, neither of these seem to be available in standard packages - I guess hacking window title isn't considered mainstream ;-) Regards, Martin Martin Visser
Technology Consultant Consulting & Integration Technology Solutions Group - HP Services 410 Concord Road Rhodes NSW 2138 Australia Mobile: +61-411-254-513 Fax: +61-2-9022-1800 E-mail: martin.visserAThp.com This email (including any attachments) is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above and may contain information that is confidential, proprietary or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify HP immediately by return email and then delete the email, destroy any printed copy and do not disclose or use the information in it. ________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Michael Davies Sent: Wed 23/08/2006 4:57 PM To: Luke Vanderfluit Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [SLUG] change title of xterm window On 8/23/06, Luke Vanderfluit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I use lots of xterms on my screen. > I'd like to be able to change the title of the xterm window, by type in it at > the prompt. > > Anyone know how to do this? Going back to ancient history, I found this mouthfull in my .cshrc file set frobnicate = "some string" set prompt="%{\e]2\;${frobnicate}^g\e]1\;%m^g\r%}%B%m:%n:%c4:%h%#%b " You need to send control chars to the xterm, you can do that via the prompt under tcsh. That doesn't translate directly into bash, but should start you on the right track. Alternatively you can google for "xterm bash title change" and feel lucky. Reading http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Xterm-Title.html tells us that: PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${FROBNICATE}\007"' FROBNICATE="some string" What is quite useful is that you only need to change ${FROBNICATE} to change the title dynamically. HTH, Michael... -- Michael Davies "Do what you think is interesting, do mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] something that you think is fun and http://michaeldavies.org <http://michaeldavies.org/> worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway." -- Brian Kernighan -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
