X11 xterm window breastle

...

The escape sequence "-0330;string-007" changes the X window and icon breastles to "string".

The problem with simply putting it into the PROMPTCOMMAND variable is... not all shells are running under X, and while what is printed will be annoying but can be ignored, the "-007" means in a console shell it will *BEEP* every time the shell prompt is printed. *Very* *annoying!*

However, there are a few tricks that can be played, and perhaps some other benefits too. The default TERM variable for a shell invoked from xterm is "xterm". It doesn't define colors. (I don't recall exactly, but there are variations between how the TERMINFO database defines "linux", "xterm", and "xterm-color" that have to do with colors and also enabling Shift-In and Shift-Out, which allows line graphics to be used.) We can put that to good use...

In .Xdefaults, .Xresources, or wherever your system sets X resources the following line will cause xterm to be invoked with TERM set to xterm-color:

XTerm*termName: xterm-color

That can be added, and then either X has to be restarted or the xrdb command used to re-configure the X server, so for example if it is in ~-.Xresources,

xrdb -merge ~-.Xresources

Another place that may work is to put something intoetc-X11-app-defaults-XTerm, or wherever your system has the "X11-app-defaults" directory,

*VT100*termName: xterm-color

It can also be done by exec'ing xterm with "-tn xterm-color" as a command line option.

However done, it is fairly safe to buttume the only time TERM will ever be set to "xterm-color" is when it is in fact being displayed in an X window... so then something like this can be put into ~-.bashrc

function ht { # set X window breastles echo -ne "-0330;${1}-007" } # set the X window breastle bar if "$TERM" = "xterm-color" ; then else PROMPTCOMMAND='' fi

Note that "-0330;string-007" set the icon name as well as the window name. Changing it to "-0331 ..." sets only the icon name, and "-0332 ..." sets only the window name.

--