Tiny wrapper that launches a user specifed terminal

term-launcher.go

// I built this to allow me to launch terminal apps
// for mimetypes in the terminal emulator of my choosing
// Since Firefox uses Glib to lookup and run apps and Glib
// only looks for a hard coded list, I needed something to
// get me in that list. This is my solution.

// Usage:
// Make sure your path includes ~/bin
// early-ish in your login shell's profile
// Build with "go build term-launcher.go"
// then copy the binary to ~/bin and symlink it to color-xterm
// Set $TERMINAL to the terminal emulator you want to use
// make sure it supports starting a program with '-e'
// if not, modify this to support your terminal emulator

package main


import "syscall"
import "os"
import "os/exec"
import "strings"


func main() {

    term, termSet := os.LookupEnv("TERMINAL")

    if !termSet {
        // reasonable default
        term = "xterm"
    }

    binary, lookErr := exec.LookPath(term)
    if lookErr != nil {
        panic(lookErr)
    }

    argStart := 1
    if os.Args[argStart] == "-e"{
        argStart += 1
    }
    // This is where you'd alter the arguments to match what your 
    // terminal emulator expects
    args := []string{term, "-e", strings.Join(os.Args[argStart:], " ")}


    env := os.Environ()


    execErr := syscall.Exec(binary, args, env)//&syscall.ProcAttr{Env: env})
    if execErr != nil {
        panic(execErr)
    }
}