Linux Terminal that supports customizing icon, cursor color as well as all other colors

Question

Besides evilvte, is there any terminal emulator on Linux which (without crashing) allows me to, on a per host basis, specify both cursor, foreground and background color and also icon (that is, the icon shown when the running application is minimized)?

I'm doing SSH into a quite large number of different hosts and to make it easier for me to keep track of which host I'm logged on to, each host has a unique color scheme (that is, an unique combination of background, foreground and cursor color) I use for it's terminal Windows. To make it easier to instinctively navigate properly between these terminal sessions, I also rely on customizing the terminal emulator setup so the icon used for it when it is minimized (or when doing ALT-TAB in my XFCE desktop) is reflecting the color scheme it is using.

(I have a perl program that generates an terminal graphic with background, foreground and cursor colors matching the color scheme I use for the host, so I can easily generate an appropriate icon for every host I'm supposed to work with)

The problem with this approach is not that it does not work (it does indeed work as a charm!), but that it is hard to pick a good enough terminal emulator which does support all of the following:

• Per session customizable icon graphics (in the sense I can specify any image on disk).
• Per session customizable background, foreground and cursor color.
• Preferably also per session customizable ANSI colors (including 'bright' colors 8 to 15), simply because if the background color is red, I want to tweak the ANSI red and bright red so they differ a bit from the background color. (Yes, I got a script that automates that tweaking too)

Right now I rely on evilvte because it is the only terminal software that allows me to customize both the icon as well as all colors (cursor, foreground, background, bold, dim and all of the ANSI ones). The problem with evilvte is that I have to compile one separate binary per session (partially automated and works but frankly quite ugly approach). Also, evilvte does not support that you decrease width or height of the terminal window (that is, decrease the number of columns or rows) in spite of allowing you to increase width/height. Another potential problem with evilvte is that I've done a fairly ugly hack to tweak all ANSI colors for it which might or might not work for future evilvte versions.

I have tried gnome-terminal, but it did originally lack the ability to customize the cursor color and once one included support for that it was decided to remove the ability to customize the icon on a per session basis.

Any pointer to a terminal that provides all the features I need but without the headaches I get when using evilvte would be appreciated.

Edit: Matt Jenkins provide a good and well written answer where he suggests that I use xterm and provide some good hints for howe to use it. Unfortunately, xterm do have some limitations that makes it unsuitable for my needs (xterm only support monochrome black and white icon pixmaps and it has hard coded, compiled in ANSI colors). So, I did not accept his answer (clicking the checkmark) but I still "upped" it one point.

Answer 1

It would seem that "konsole" is your friend.

After an extensive investigation into multiple terminal programs I have found:

• konsole supports setting custom colour schemes:

• konsole supports custom icons:

• konsole supports multiple profiles - no need for scripting. Just create a new profile for each server. You can even include the ssh command in the profile to auto-login to the server.

Oh, and konsole is tabbed too, so you can reduce clutter, and group servers together in less windows. (Maybe all your web servers in one window, all your file servers in another, etc).

For setting the icon in the window manager (that's a separate icon to the "profile" icon) you need to specify the --icon flag to the konsole command:

$ konsole --icon /usr/share/icons/oxygen/16x16/apps/java.png

Which gives:

Coupling that with --profile should yield the result you are after.

Note that this window manager icon doesn't change when you change tabs, so it could be used as an icon to identify groups of tabs - say all your web servers - or you don't use the tabs and just stick to 1 window per server.

Answer 2

Most Linux terminal software gives you command-line flags to set the behaviour - even the most basic xterm.

Let's address some of your requirements:

• Per session customizable icon graphics (in the sense I can specify any image on disk).

These have nothing to do with the terminal program. These are "shortcut" icons that launch the terminal program (I think that's what you're after). You should look at the .desktop file format.

• Per session customizable background, foreground and cursor color.

You should investigate what command-line flags your favourite terminal program has. For example, xterm has -fg and -bg:

$ xterm -fg gold -bg darkblue

• Preferably also per session customizable ANSI colors (including 'bright' colors 8 to 15), simply because if the background color is red, I want to tweak the ANSI red and bright red so they differ a bit from the background color. (Yes, I got a script that automates that tweaking too)

The ANSI colours are predefined standards. They shouldn't be changed. Most terminal programs will allow you to specify "default" foreground and background from a large palette of colours which are not limited to the normal 16 ANSI colours. For a full list of these colours take a look at the rgb.txt file. It is somewhere in your Linux distro and contains "standard" X11 colours. On Ubuntu it's in /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt.

As an added bit of identification most terminal programs will let you set the window title. For example with good ol' xterm you can use:

$ xterm -bg darkblue -fg gold -title "My terminal"

And even throw in a command to execute:

$ xterm -bg darkblue -fg gold -title "Web Server" -e "ssh myuser@webserver.mycompany.com"

What you end up with is something like this:

Put that command into the target of a "Web Server.desktop" file, along with a pointer to the webserver's icon, and bob's your uncle!

Edit:

I just read the bit about how you want to use the icons.

Setting the icon in the titlebar is a case of setting the "iconPixmap" X resource. This can be done with the -xrm flag to point to an "XBM" file:

$ xterm -xrm '*iconPixmap: /path/to/icon.xbm'