Bug 1296110

1. What is the nature and description of the request?

The request is to include 'Title' option support for gnome-terminal windows and tabs similar to what was available in older versions of gnome-terminal as available in RHEL prior to the RHEL7.2 release.

Previous versions of gnome-terminal prior to RHEL 7.2 allowed titles to be set in terminal windows and tabs with the --title option.  It was also possible to set the title on a tab by performing a right-click on a tab and selecting the 'Set Title...' option.  In addition, there was also a preserve title feature that could be set via the gnome-terminal "Profile Preferences" --> "Title and Command" --> "Title: Keep initial title" selection.  This was useful in conjunction with --title in many circumstances.


2. Why would you need it ? (List the business requirements here)

Used in various combinations these 3 options can address terminal managment in many situations.  The above options all helped to effectively manage a large number of terminal widows/tabs over multiple workspaces.   The --title option was very useful for defining predefined window/tab sets for a large number of systems and various activities.  The right-click set title option allowed one to easily rename a tab with a running process so it could easily be identified, found, and tracked or to avoid accidental closure.  There appears to be no viable title alternative for these use cases.  Sysetem Administrators and others are often working with dozens (and dozens and dozens) of terminal windows and tabs.  The system terminal is a critical application in Linux/UNIX environments especially in an enterprise environment.  To perform an operation in the wrong terminal window/tab can be catastrophic.


3. How would you like to achieve this? (List the functional requirements here)

Ideally restoration of title features as found in gnome-terminal prior to the release of RHEL 7.2 (i.e., gnome-terminal-3.8.4-8.el7 or earlier).  Any of the features are better than none but ideally all the title features would be restored include the profile feature related to titles.


4. For each functional requirement listed, specify how Red Hat and you can test to confirm the requirement is successfully implemented.

The '--title' option can be tested with a code block like the following:

#!/usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/gnome-terminal --window --geometry=132x40 --profile='default' --title='host1' \
--tab --profile='site.tpreserve' --title=host2 \
--tab --profile='site.tpreserve' --title=host3 \
--tab --profile='site.tpreserve' --title=host4

The right-click 'set title' option on a tab can be tested as described above.


5. Do you have any specific timeline dependencies ?

No


6. Is the sales team involved in this request and do they have any additional input?

No


7. Would you be able to assist in testing this functionality if implemented? 

Yes


Additional details:

Gnome rebase to 3.14 must have done this,
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724110
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740188