Hi: I am exploring the possibility of using konsole instead of xterm to run a terminal session, mainly because I believe it might give me a broader set of color options. But I don't know if it's possible to set things like colors and font on the command line when invoking konsole.
What would be great is something like this...
konsole --fg=#ff00ff --bf=#00ff00 -fn= (etc...)
What would be just as good is if I could create and post a profile (as a file) and reference that. Something like...
konsole --profile=/proj/settings/the_konsole.profile
What I can't have is setting colors with a gui tool. The konsole is going to be created for users and they won't have the time/interest/knowledge to play with that stuff.
If the first option is viable, can I specify the color using the hex representation as in the example ?
Thanks
I found that this works...
Create a profile using the gui
-> Settings -> Manage profiles -> New profile -> Etc...
For me, the profile file appeared in... ~/.kde/share/apps/konsole/MyProfileName.profile
Then, just call it out when you invoke konsole...
konsole --profile ~/share/apps/konsole/MyProfileName.profile
Seems to work.
One other thing I discovered...
WHen trying to set the size of the terminal it creates, use --geometry="widthxheight". E.g. --geometry="1000x500"
You also need to use --nofork to get this to work right.
Hope this helps someone.
Related
I'm trying to make a bash script that behaves differently based on the terminal program that someone is using (Putty, mobaxterm, etc). Is there any way to retrieve this kind of information from a bash script?
I was searching around online but I was not able to find anything (or I'm just wording it incorrectly, which could be a distinct possibility).
thank you
You need to understand that these are terminal emulators. There is a simple, crude identification function for (most?) modern line terminals (now that's an oxymoron!) but it will return something like vt102 or xterm i.e. whatever the emulator is emulating; not the identity of the program performing this emulation. Incidentally, this is usually used when the session is initiated, and reflected in the value of the $TERM environment variable.
The common way to do this is the environment variable TERM. Try
echo $TERM
That should output the terminal emulator's type, indicating its capabilities. Often, though not always, the value of TERM will be the name of the terminal emulator. For example, xterm may set TERM to xterm, or to xterm-color, depending on configuration.
Note that the user can change this variable, so it may contain something completely different.
That said, if you want to do fancy things with the terminal from a script, you don't need to build support for different terminals by hand. There are various libraries that offer all the usual functions (clear terminal, resize window, change font etc.). The most popular one is terminfo; there are various packages that build on terminfo.
I've created a couple of very simple bash scripts for a home-made games arcade (input configuration, updating stuff etc). I've got a launcher, so it's not a problem to direct the user to run the wanted shell script, but while running a bash script functionality-wise gives me everything I need, the default low-res text-on-black look scares the end user.
What is the simplest way to "prettify" fullscreen shell scripts? Something that'll run the script in 1080p, use bigger bubbly antialiased fonts, add a fancy animated background etc., but still pretty much lets me stick to write good-old shell scripts?
I guess another way to ask is: Does a prettier, more modern GUI-looking alternative to whiptail exist?
I am running from the terminal, so the GUI library it would have to be as fully self-contained as possible.
The ability of a shell script to display a quit within the terminal window itself is limited entirely to the graphical capabilities of the terminal (and to what termcap/terminfo has support for).
Most terminals max out at 256 colors (though supposedly konsole has support for arbitrary RGB colors somehow).
Control over font sizing/etc. from the shell is limited to the escape sequences that the terminal is willing to respond to (and I don't know if those are at all standard or discoverable at runtime).
The best option for this might be to have your script re-exec itself in a new terminal window to which it passes appropriate arguments to control font selection, window geometry, color selection, etc.
That being said even reliably doing that isn't necessarily the easiest thing in the world (I'm not sure how portable the command line options are between different terminal emulators or how many more advanced features they expose).
You could use python with the library Gooey that makes easy to turn CLI applications to GUI:
It can be customized and it takes only one line for the magic to happen:
from gooey import Gooey
#Gooey <--- all it takes! :)
def main():
# rest of code
I currently use a color scheme based on which directory that I'm working in. I manually open up a Konsole shell and then cd into a directory and got to Settings and change the color scheme.
What I would like to do is have Konsole automatically set its foreground and background colors based on which directory I'm in. Basically if I'm in any subdirectory below /home/me/src/java then I would like to use text white, background blue, for example. If I'm below /home/me/src/documentation I want text black, background white, for example. I would like the color change to occur automatically, programmatically, when I call the "cd" command.
Is this possible? If so, can you provide me some direction as to how?
The way I see it I will need to be able to do a couple of things:
Be able to detect which Konsole the shell process (bash) is running in.
Be able to tell Konsole, probably via API call, to change the color scheme on the fly.
To get you started, here's a little information about using D-Bus to script Konsole.
You don't say which shell you're using, but if it's Bash you may want to use the $PROMPT_COMMAND variable which holds a command to be executed each time the $PS1 prompt is issued. The Z shell has a similar facility that's probably a bit more powerful (see man zshmisc for chpwd and precmd).
Otherwise, you might be able to use xterm escape sequences.
Context
Actually, Konsole has support for what they profiles. A profile is a group of settings (not only background), which you can manually define under Settings | Manage Profiles and around.
Also, there exists a command line utility called konsoleprofile which allows for programmatic changing of the profiles.
Actual answer
Go to Settings | Edit Current Profile... | Appearance
Define new Color Scheme for each of the directories you want to have special background for, e.g. myprofile1, myprofile2, mystandard
Make sure you can manually call konsoleprofile ColorScheme=myprofile1, konsoleprofile ColorScheme=standard, etc.
Plug in the calls to konsoleprofile into your $PROMPT_COMMAND, e.g. add this to your .bashrc:
PROMPT_COMMAND='[[ "$PWD" = /home/me/src/java* ]] && konsoleprofile ColorScheme=myprofile1 || konsoleprofile ColorScheme=mystandard'";$PROMPT_COMMAND"
Is there any way to change the font size of terminal window(GNOME or KDE) from inside a shell script
Actually I want to display a file in a particular format on screens of all sizes.
Can i do it using scripts??
For KDE, you can use dcop to set your font size.
For example:
dcop konsole-8540 session-6 setFont Monospace,20,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
(the 20 in the example above is the font size)
I for one would surely not want a shell script (or any other program for that matter) to change my terminal settings! If it were to find a way to do so, I would use it exactly once and them remove it from my machine.
Seriously: This is something you should not do, because the user will probably have set his or her screen size to the way it is for a reason that is probably better than yours for changing it. Consider handicapped people who might need a specific font or very large letters to be able to read the screen at all.
Better try and make your application suitable for any terminal layout - there are variables for telling you how many characters wide and how many lines high your current environment is.
I like to keep my shell sessions named with useful titles as I work, this helps me keep track of what I'm using each of the many tabs for.
Currently to rename a session I double click its name on the tabbed part of the console - is there any command that I can use to do this from within the shell? It would save me a bit of time.
thanks in advance
edit :-
I am using KDE's Konsole shell.
The article How to change the title of an xterm should help.
Currently to rename a session I double click its name on the tabbed part of the console
This sounds like you're using KDE's Konsole. Is this true?
If so, in KDE 3:
dcop $KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION renameSession "I am renamed!"
In KDE 4, the old DCOP interfaces haven't been ported over to the new D-BUS IPC yet, but you can change the settings for tabnames to follow the window name set by each screen, and set the window name as described by the other answers.
According to this page, you should be able to use something like this:
echo -n "\033]0;New Window Title\007"
I'm not in Linux at the moment, so this is untested. I do know that it is possible to change the window title under program control, so this seems likely to work.
For /usr/bin/konsole
you can change the title of a konsole terminal from the menu:
Settings->Edit Current Profile->Tabs
edit "Tab title format" to be whatever you want. After interacting with the shell, the title will reset to what you put.
for /usr/bin/xterm running in xorg-server 2:1.10.1-1ubuntu1
echo -ne "\033]0;My Fun X-Terminal\007"
The answer to this really depends on the terminal program you're using.
However, I'll just assume it's sensible, and emulates an xterm enough that it respects xterm escape codes - in which case, you probably want to look here : http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Xterm-Title.html#s3
Note: unwind's example below requires echo to be called like this "echo -ne", otherwise the '\' characters are echoed literally.
For the default terminal on Ubuntu (I'm still on 10.04) try xtitle.
$> sudo apt-get install xtitle
...
$> xtitle --title wow it worked!
or simply
$> xtitle this is great