Hello,

Graphical terminal emulator have a useful specific feature that other do not
have: the window title. But here again, they use different control sequence to
access to it. I think this makes this feature a good candidate for terminfo,
but there exist no capability related to “window title”.

Fortunately, the graphical terminal emulator often miss another feature, the
status line, which has a function very close to the window title. In fact the
window title is perceived as replacing, or implementing a status line for
graphical terminal emulators. Thus, several terminal emulators declared the hs,
tsl and fls capabilities to control the status line: this is the case of
terminator, rxvt-unicode and st, for instance.

So, would it be possible to add hs, tsl, fsl and wsl to the xterm definition?
I think that would be:
    hs,
    tsl=\E]0;,
    fsl=^G,
    wsl=-1,

This is useful to write terminal-independant shell configuration that set the
window title. A common use is to add the working directory to the window title,
for instance.

The status capabilities are documented (and standardized) to use a
parameter (the starting column at which to begin writing).

xterm's title control sequence doesn't honor that parameter.

Therefore any use of that would have to be via an extension entry.

Thomas Dickey, 2011-07-21 05:44 UTC-0400:

Are they? The terminfo manpage only indicates that tsl is to go to the
status line, first column. Then the status line may allow to use control
sequence; this is indicated by the capability eslok.

Then there is also the wsl capability that indicates the status line
width if it is different from the terminal width: for rxvt-unicode it is
set to -1, which I guess is to indicate that it has a free width.

The "#1" means that its a parameter, and (tersely) that it's the column.
Not ambiguous.

If rxvt-unicode had documentation, we might discuss it...

Thomas Dickey, 2011-07-21 06:39 UTC-0400:

Oh, right, I missed it, sorry. Okay, that was my suggestion but are now
this topic better than I do, so I shall let you decide what to do with
this report now.

Tanguy Ortolo, 2011-07-21 13:04 UTC+0200:
but if the decision is between adding or not hs, tsl and fsl to the
xterm definition, I think this is the question that should be
considered: will the situation be better or worse than it is currently?

For what I see, the current situation is:
* many shell configurations and programs use hardcoded escape sequences
  for xterm only, and do not use other terminal's window title features
  because they do not know about it;
* several other graphical terminal emulators expose tsl and fsl for
  window title, simply ignoring the column argument;
* as far as I know, there exist no program that use the status line
  column selection, but I may be wrong: did you get many bug reports
  about rxvt-unicode's tsl that does not honor the position argument?

Introducing tsl and fsl would:
* allow to write portable shell configurations and programs;
* break all the programs that rely on the status line column
  selection.

If the number of programs that rely on the status line column selection
is actually null, then I think this would only be a benefit.

more to the point (a quick glance at the terminal database shows me that a
majority use the parameter, and that the "several" which you may be
considering is still only a small fraction of the total).  For discussion
purposes, there's a "xterm+sl block, which has only been mentioned 2-3
times over the past 10 years.

bug reports about urxvt would be forwarded to its developer...

(an extension name would not conflict with existing usage)