Setting xterm titles while building

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

port could make use of the xterm title to provide some indicator what is currently doing. When using verbose or debug mode a lot of code will scroll by making it difficult to see what is actually being run at the moment.

Such titles can be set by writing to stdout with special escape sequences, such as:

echo -ne "\033]0;Foo Bar\007"

This will be implemented in the branch branches/xterm-titles.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

The branch is now kind of usable, please test. One known problem is that it does not reset the title after port exited.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

Unfortunately there is no reliable way to get the title in all terminals in order to restore it later. xterm seems to have special control characters for this, but those have not been implemented in Terminal.app. A solution would be to always reset to "" or "Terminal" (the default string in Terminal.app). A user-defined PROMPT_COMMAND could override this as well.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Cc Me!

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

I would drop this idea as there is no reliable way to get and set the window title across terminal emulators. While xterm defines some sequences to also get the current title, they do not seem to be supported by Terminal.app on macOS. The feature would only be useful if it just worked out of the box without any configuration. Also there is a chance that printing such escape sequences that are not actually understood or misinterpreted by the terminal emulator to produce garbled output.