x-terminal-emulator compatibility

[madduck]

Hello,

Debian has an "alternatives" system, allowing other tools to rely on presence of e.g. x-terminal-emulator, which Kitty then can fulfill. This works fine, and Kitty even swallows -e, the standard way to pass a command to the terminal emulator.

But there are a few others, such as -name, -cd, -hold, and -title. Kitty implements those with double-dashes, but that is not following the convention that's existed for decades.

For Kitty to be a drop-in x-terminal-emulator on Debian-based distributions, it would be good if the short, single-dash options would be available as a fallback. So that I can call kitty -name irc -cd ~/irc -title irc -hold -e irssi and effectively get the same result as kitty --name irc -d ~/irc --title irc --hold irssi.

Is this something worth considering?

[kovidgoyal]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 04:35:17AM -0700, martin f. krafft wrote: Hello, Debian has an "alternatives" system, allowing other tools to rely on presence of e.g. `x-terminal-emulator`, which Kitty then can fulfill. This works fine, and Kitty even swallows `-e`, the standard way to pass a command to the terminal emulator.

-e is not a standard, it's a horrible hack first implemented by xterm and copied by a few others that should have known better. -e doesn't allow for an actual command line just a single command.

But there are a few others, such as `-name`, `-cd`, `-hold`, and `-title`. Kitty implements those with double-dashes, but that is not following the convention that's existed for decades. For Kitty to be a drop-in `x-terminal-emulator` on Debian-based distributions, it would be good if the short, single-dash options would be available as a fallback. So that I can call `kitty -name irc -cd ~/irc -title irc -hold -e irssi` and effectively get the same result as `kitty --name irc -d ~/irc --title irc --hold irssi`. Is this something worth considering?

Absolutely not. There is an actual convention for processing command line arguments, first formalised by the GNU project in the 80s where long option names use double dashes. kitty follows that. That is *not* going to change. Debian needs to be updated to use xdg-terminal-exec not x-terminal-emulator, if it isnt already.