Control: severity -1 wishlist
On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 05:09:02PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
Unfortunately, Alacritty does not accept the -name command-line option, and
instead spews and error message. This is a problem when it is used as a drop-in
to x-terminal-emulator, which sometimes gets passed the -name option (supported
by every other terminal emulator that I know).
Just checking the other terminals I have installed, kitty and
gnome-terminal also do not support this option. Although gnome-terminal
added a wrapper to align with x-terminal-emulator's requirements and
included support for a few "non-standard options", "-name" being one of
them.
albatross:~% x-terminal-emulator -name foo
#(pts/33) 16 17:06:53.105
error: unexpected argument '-n' found
Usage: x-terminal-emulator [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]
For more information, try '--help'.
For what it's worth, there's no expectation that x-terminal-emulator
supports this option. The only requirements are documented in Policy
11.8.3:
To be an "x-terminal-emulator", a program must:
* Be able to emulate a DEC VT100 terminal, or a compatible terminal.
* Support the command-line option "-e command", which creates a new
terminal window [6] and runs the specified command. <command> may
be multiple arguments, which form the argument list to the executed
program. In other words, the behavior is as though the arguments
were passed directly to "execvp", bypassing the shell. ("xterm"’s
behavior of falling back on using the shell if "-e" had a single
argument and exec failed is permissible but not required.)
* Support the command-line option "-T title", which creates a new
terminal window with the window title title.
I did work with upstream to get -T supported before having it provide
the x-terminal-emulator alternative, but they already had support for
--title so it was just aliasing the existing option.
Anything passing "-name" to x-terminal-emulator is expecting more than
the abstraction guarantees. I'm not sure that's something that's worth
supporting.
Cheers,
--
James
GPG Key: 4096R/91BF BF4D 6956 BD5D F7B7 2D23 DFE6 91AE 331B A3DB
