Use mate-terminal as replacement for xterm

readme.md

Introduction

This little script below will overwrite xterm and use mate-terminal instead, for applications ignoring that xterm sucks. It's written for use with monodevelop, but it should work with little to no edit with any other application.

Installation

If you have xterm installed beforehand, uninstall it now or a package manager update will overwrite this script. To install it, simply copy the script to /usr/bin and rename it xterm. Then chmod +x /usr/bin/xterm and you're done.

Notes

There's a log in /tmp/xterm.log in case you need to debug something.

xterm.sh

#!/bin/bash
param=""
tempfile="$(mktemp --suffix '-mono-run')"

echo "Tempfile is $tempfile" >> /tmp/xterm.log

echo "Started with parameters" > /tmp/xterm.log

# iterate over each param, fixing any incompatibilities
while test ${#} -gt 0; do
	echo "(p) $1" >> /tmp/xterm.log

	if [[ "$1" == "-c" ]]; then
		# found the execute command
		# we need to put this into a temporary script since escaping doesn't seem to work
		shift

		echo '#!/bin/bash' > $tempfile
		echo "$1" >> $tempfile

		chmod +x $tempfile

		param="$param -e $tempfile"
	elif [[ "$1" == "-title" ]]; then # the title parameter has two dashes with mate-terminal
		param="$param --title"
	elif [[ "$1" != "bash" ]] && [[ "$1" != "-e" ]]; then
		param="$param \"$1\""
	fi

	shift
done

echo >> /tmp/xterm.log
echo -- new parameter string -- >> /tmp/xterm.log
echo >> /tmp/xterm.log

echo "$param" >> /tmp/xterm.log

# start mate-terminal
DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/mate-terminal --disable-factory $param 

rm $tempfile