Bug 206888

Summary:	wish: restore lost KDE3 konsole ability to function as controlled terminal emulator
Product:	[Applications] konsole	Reporter:	John R MacMillan <nba.xqr>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	a.samirh78, christian.herhaus, cpigat242, robertknight
Priority:	NOR
Version:	2.2.2
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Ubuntu
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description John R MacMillan 2009-09-09 19:20:10 UTC

Version:           2.2.2 (using KDE 4.3.1)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages

Arguably this is a bug, as it represents a regression in behaviour, but
with the KDE4 makeover konsole is no longer able to function as a basic
terminal emulator for other tools / programs to use and control.

I work at a company that produces a Java GUI product that sometimes has to
launch console-based applications. It's cross platform, so we try to do this
in a console the user is familiar with. On Windows, they get an MS-DOS console,
on Gnome, a gnome-terminal, on KDE3 a konsole, and on KDE4...xterm (yuck).

The problem is that with KDE4 konsole no longer allows our application to
specify certain elements (eg. -vt_sz, -bg, -fg, --miniicon, -T, -geometry,
etc.).

We use these to both control the look, size, and placement of the terminal
emulator, because we know reasonable values for these for the applications
we are launching in the terminal.

Essentially what we need is a way to create a one-off "profile" with
command-line options.

I know it might be possible to automatically craft up a profile to use,
but frankly, since all the other UNIX terminal emulators we support can
be controlled directly from the command-line, we would not bother, and we
will stick with xterm.

The KDE4 konsole changes possibly make for a better end-user experience
in the normal case of the user starting and using the konsole, but in the
case of other tools using it programmatically to display console-based
applications, it's definitely not as functional as in KDE3.

Comment 1 Robert Knight 2009-09-09 23:25:54 UTC

> Essentially what we need is a way to create a one-off
> "profile" with command-line options.

You can do this to some extent using the -p command which allows properties to be overridden for a new Konsole instance.  The keys/values accepted by -p are the same as those stored in the Konsole settings (.profile) files in ~/.kde/share/apps/konsole/

You can use the --title and --icon arguments to control the title and icon.

For example:

konsole -p colorscheme=BlackOnWhite -p TabBarMode=0 --title "My Application" --icon <path to icon or name of icon>

The major omissions from the list you mentioned are direct equivalents for --vt_sz, --fg and --bg (although for the latter two you can specify the name of one of the color schemes that ships with Konsole if they are close enough using -p colorscheme=<name>)

Comment 2 John R MacMillan 2009-09-10 14:48:35 UTC

Thanks, I missed the significance of -p in the help.

That gets us pretty close to what we want (close enough
I'll switch from xterm), but I think it would still be nice
if we could specify the colors and size directly.

Comment 3 Jekyll Wu 2011-08-18 11:12:55 UTC

*** Bug 128755 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Ahmad Samir 2018-03-25 09:43:42 UTC

The size you can achieve with e.g. '-p TerminalColumns=80 -p TerminalRows=80', for the color, just pick a color scheme that's close to the colors you want.

KDE4/Konsole is no longer maintained.