I wanted to execute some command in terminal emulator, like Konsole, but I need to make this cross-desktop.
Is there some command like xdg-open, but for getting the default terminal emulator?
I'm using Ubuntu.
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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In Debian, you could just call x-terminal-emulator -e /some/command, as this points to the terminal emulator configured by Debian's "alternative" mechanism. It's configured via
# update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator
which lets you chose which of the installed X11 terminal emulators to use as the default one, i.e. as x-terminal-emulator. In the end, it's a symlink construction, e.g. for gnome-terminal:
$ which x-terminal-emulator
/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
$ ls -al /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 Apr 26 2010 /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator -> /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator
$ ls -al /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Apr 26 2010 /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator -> /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper
$ file /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper
/usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper: Perl script, ASCII text executable
Some remarks,
- I'm not sure if Ubuntu works analogously, though.
- There seems to be (have been?) something called
xdg-terminal, but apparently not in Debian.
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Unfortunately, it does not work on Fedora 16 with Gnome 3.2.1 – fheub Feb 24 '12 at 09:52
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1@AaronLewis Note that this is the system default. I don't think there's any standard way of obtaining the user's favorite X terminal emulator. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 24 '12 at 19:06