What does it mean to set a terminal’s “icon title”

window titlex11xterm

I generally see the syntax for setting the terminal title as (something like):

echo -e '\e]0;Some Title\a'

But I noticed this answer used 2 instead of 0, which prompted me to do a little more digging. According to this document you can actually set both the "icon name" and the "window title" with this syntax:

·  ESC]0;stringBEL -- Set icon name and window title to string

·  ESC]1;stringBEL -- Set icon name to string

·  ESC]2;stringBEL -- Set window title to string

   where ESC is the escape character (\033), and BEL is the bell
   character (\007).

Printing one of these sequences within the xterm will cause the window
or icon title to be changed.

But it doesn't go on to explain what exactly it means by "icon title" or "icon name". When I try it out I don't see any difference between 0 and 2, and 1 doesn't appear to do anything.

So what is the "icon title", and what is supposed to happen when 0 or 1 is called?

Best Answer

This is X11 code perhaps ignored or unimplemented by modern Window Managers. Luckily, I don't run a modern Window Manger, so with FVWM on OpenBSD, I can set the icon name to blah, then minimize that xterm:

Which produces an icon with that name.

Related Solutions

Bash – How to make the Xterm window title switch between the current running command and the current path

You can do this if you use a function that checks whether $BASH_COMMAND is set and prints your CWD if it is not. Add these lines to your ~/.bashrc:

trap 'echo -ne "\033]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007"' DEBUG
function show_name(){ 
    if [[ -n "$BASH_COMMAND" ]]; 
    then 
    echo -en "\033]0;`pwd`\007"; 
    else 
    echo -en "\033]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007"; 
    fi 
}
export PROMPT_COMMAND='show_name'

This will cause your terminal's name to be the currently running command (if there is one) or your current directory if there is not. Bear in mind that this will result in a slightly schizophrenic terminal if you run a long loop that runs a command many times. Try it with while true; do echo foo; done for example.

If you are using zsh this is much easier to achieve (source) and it handles loops correctly:

case $TERM in
    xterm*)
      preexec () {
        print -Pn "\e]0;$*\a"
      }
    ;;
esac

In xterm, what is “Icon Name”

A long time ago, there was a window manager called twm—actually, it still exists and runs perfectly well. Instead of minimizing a window to a bar at the bottom of the screen (or similar) like MS Windows, Mac OS X, and many modern window managers, it shrunk them to labeled icons ("iconfify").

The Wikipedia twm article has some nice pictures, such as:

Screenshot from TWM

The window title is what goes in the titlebar (e.g., the "Calculator" or "xterm"). The icon name is what goes under the icon when iconified (the "xclock"). Modern window managers probably all ignore the icon name because they don't use the icon UI.

A full description of both can be found in the ICCCM.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – How to make the Xterm window title switch between the current running command and the current path

In xterm, what is “Icon Name”

Related Question