The problem here is that the icon used for a terminal is determined by
the profile. 

One way to fix this would be to add a `Use default icon' checkbox to
the profile editor (when set, the Profile Icon icon chooser would be
desensitivised) and, when that is set, use the theme terminal icon. In
that case we need to listen to changes in
/desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme, I guess.

That's one more pref...

I don't think there is any need for a preference.  It should just use
the theme-specified icon by default.  Thats what the user would expect
anyway.

That's what the user would expect unless she set a different icon for
the profile she is using.

Mariano: sure, so only override the theme pref in case they've set 
something in profile. No need to have an extra preference.

Well, the icon selector always shows something, so we do need a "Use the theme
icon for terminals" checkbox on the General tab of the profile editor, just as
we have a "Use the system terminal font" checkbox.

A checkbox would really be the only way to revert to the default in the prefs
UI, I guess, unless we got rid of the [] Use System Foo everywhere, and just had
a [Revert] button as one of the dialog buttons. Perhaps we should just get rid
of the custom icon functionality. This bug report has been open for 2 years now,
and nothing has changed. I don't suspect enough people use the feature to
warrant it really being there. Custom icons in the terminal is not especially
useful anyway, especially if you use tabs. You may want to find a particular tab
in the UI, and a custom icon set for the profile in use by the focused tab, that
is different than the one you're looking for, in which case the icon doesn't
really help to find the terminal in question. My vote is to get rid of it (and
I've started working on a patch to do so, and use the icon theme, instead).

Created attachment 54931 [details] [review]
Patch to force use of icon theme

This patch removes all of the related code for using custom icons on profiles.
It instead always uses the icon theme for all gnome-terminal windows, by asking
for the terminal icon name as specified by the icon naming spec, and then
falling back to "gnome-terminal" as the icon name. It works quite nicely, and
simplifies the UI a bit, by removing the large button in the prefs window that
created a lot of extraneous whitespace for the associated label.

Created attachment 55348 [details] [review]
Use icon theme without removing profile icon support

Hi,

I find custom icons for profiles very useful for distinguishing terminals in
the panel window list and in Metacity's switch window popup. My normal use case
is to have a profile for terminals which are ssh-ed into another machine.

Attached is a patch which adds support of using the icon theme without removing
profile icon support. As suggested by previous posts I've added a "Use icon
from system theme" checkbox in the General tab of the profile editor.

Patch has been available for a two months now. Review? Commit?

There are other 160 bugs awaiting solution, and over 30 awaiting patch review. Things have do be done gradually after years of undermaintenance.

For what it's worth, I don't think Tony's patch is the right method, and mine is perhaps a bit extreme. Having a [] Use System Setting for every setting in the dialog is a bit cumbersome. We should check the icon name in code and if it's "gnome-terminal" or "utilities-terminal" (the name from the icon naming spec, use the icon from the theme, otherwise, use the custom icon's full path. At least, this is the best way to keep the custom icon feature, and use the theme, I think. I'm all for just getting rid of the feature though. :)

How about just changing from pixmap lookup to icon lookup? Won't a custom icon (i.e. absolute path) result in the same pixmap being loaded in both cases?

There is still the problem of being able to choose an icon (i.e. non-absolute), but I saw a rumour somewhere that a better icon picker was in the works.

I was about to file a bug for "Terminal icon chooser not using new dialog as in nautilus properties", when I found this related bug. I think if we use the new dialog, it would go a long way to solving this bug, as it has a "revert" button in it.

Any thoughts ? Perhaps I need to explain this better ?

Also, there is work going on at bug 342804.

Love, Karderio.

The about-me capplet seems to do a good job about this. Anyone cares to take a look?

I like Rodney's proposal. The feature doesn't really seem warranted to me.

The window titles of the terminal windows already provide a way to visually differentiate between profiles.

oops, clarification.

well, in the sense that users would most likely use different profiles when using the terminal for working with different systems. So the user name and directory would probably differ from one profile to another.

Retitling for the remaining issue; bug 342804 made g-t use the utilities-terminal icon.

*** Bug 531331 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 542473 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 564841 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Why has this feature been removed, I like the idea from  comment #8.  I strongly disagree with removing this feature as I've relied on it for sometime now, and I'm surely not the only one.  Can somebody justify exactly why this feature was removed, other than prefs bad, HIG good?

When you are Alt-Tabbing through quite a number of open applications, the title of the terminal application isn't visually distinctive enough to locate the application quickly.  It has really slowed down my productivity in GNOME, so I can't disagree with comment #15 more.

I completely agree with #15 and #21. I used the profile-icon feature a lot. This is a big rollback to me.

I don't use the tab functionality of Gnome-Terminal at all and just have multiple windows open with a different icon if they are for some specific use (like different icons for SSH windows to different machines).

As has been suggested before. I'm just amazed that a very handy feature is completely removed to 'fix' a minor bug!

I agree with the previous commenters. I often used the profile-icon for my terminal sessions which helped me a lot to quickly identify my different applications running in these terminal windows.

Please bring it back! :(

Yes, this was a very useful feature. Deleting the whole feature was a mistake. Please bring it back!

The problem with comment #15 is that the standard alt-tab in metacity doesn't show window titles for all windows (only the currently selected one). It's very handy to be able to differentiate different kinds of terminals without actually having to read their titles (All my ssh's to a separate host have a different icon).

BTW, you guys should rename the but description.. people are asking for the feature to be brought back, not removed.

(In reply to comment #25)
> BTW, you guys should rename the but description.. people are asking for the
> feature to be brought back, not removed.

Done. 

Another vote for bringing this feature back.  As a sysadmin I must be able to visually differentiate the 10 - 20 shells I have open at any given time.  Setting the icon in the profile was a great feature.

And Yet Another vote for bringing back the feature. This was really useful, I run ipython as my calculator in a profile and now I can't differentiate between my calculators and my shells by looking at the icon when I alt-tab.

Yet another vote for re-enabling this feature.  I installed the latest gnome-terminal (2.26.3) to test if it got the ability to customize the cursor color only to find that the ability to create custom icons for each profile were removed.  A very bad thing as I relies on that in order to quickly alt-tab to the right terminal instance when running XFCE.

Actually, bug 85821 is the request for custom cursor color (on a per profile basis) I talk about.  The ability to specify a unique background, foreground and cursor color for each host would, together with the ability to use a custom icon for each host (an icon that reflects the background, foreground and cursor colors in question) would make gnome-terminal be an absolutely outstanding choice given the current available terminal emulators.  (Yes, it would be! No other terminal emulator provides that today in a reliable manner!)

Another +1 for me.

I have a gnome-terminal 2.22.2 in my personal home dir since several years now, just to be able to have different icons with different profiles. This is a waste of efforts and a pain for users ;-(

Could I help by providing a path against current git version ?

Regards
Pierre

[...] a *patch* !

Sorry for my bad english. I do my best efforts ;-)

And another vote for re-enabling this feature.  Removing this really disturbed the way I like to work.

My +1. It's really useful for distinguishing terminals (root, ssh etc.)

Currently I use "Initial title" prepending option with symbols (⬛☢), but this is lame...

Yet another +1.   It is used not only for different shells, but some apps are started through terminal, like:

    gnome-terminal -e mc

It would be also extra convenient if it would be possible to select icon on command line.

Another +1.  It would be fine if I had to use gconf-editor or some other arcane magic - just give me the option to change the icon.

To me, terminal profiles are to be understood as the "web applications" in google chrome or mozilla prism, ie the terminal should just be a canvas where the real application is started.

Chrome and Prism allow custom icons for those applications, so you end up with the gmail icon on your browser, window list and alt-tab window if you start gmail through the "gmail" launcher on your desktop.

The same way, if I'm connecting to command line applications through a terminal, I'd like to be able to see the right icon on the title bar and, most importantly, in alt-tab and the window list, so I can find easily the right window for first class (eventually remote) terminal applications like irssi or mutt or notmuch are. An icon is much easier to spot than the small text below the icon in the metacity or gnome-shell alt-tab (I think it's even worse using gnome-shell as those "apps" would appear in the window list part of the gnome-terminal application I think).

I was surprised when I noticed this feature missing -- I've found it very useful for distinguishing the content of terminal windows.

> I don't think there is any need for a preference. 

That may be the stupidest thing I've read in months (and I was looking at Engrish.com just this morning).

I upgraded, and now every single gnome-terminal window on my task list (currently about a dozen of them, but sometimes rather a lot more) looks identical.  I sincerely hope I don't need to explain why this is bad.

I don't care one iota what the *default* is, but the existence of the preference is absolutely VITAL, and when I've gone to the trouble of setting up profiles for various completely different uses and giving each of them a very different appearance, it's because I definitely need it to be that way.

> The window titles of the terminal windows already provide 
> a way to visually differentiate between profiles.

You may as well say that all applications should use the same icon.  Why do we even need icons, or application names?  Let's just put the process ID in the window list!

The terminal is used for such an enormously wide variety of purposes that each profile effectively is a completely different application and needs its own icon.  Frankly, many terminal profiles *do* host a completely different application.  One for MySQL, one for Postgres, one for CPAN, one for tailing the Apache log...  not to mention shelling in to completely different computers entirely.  (Keeping the visual appearances of shells on different servers visually distinct is if anything rather more important than the difference between a mail reader and a web browser, or other things of that nature.)

The short version is, this feature was the key reason I have always used gnome-terminal instead of one of the various competing profile applications.  How anyone who actually uses terminals could imagine that support for "icon themes" is anywhere near as important, I'm sure I'll never know.

Now if you'll excuse me I've got to hunt down the old version and pray I can get it to compile against the libraries in Squeeze.

I have several tasks that run each in their own terminal. Being unable to tell the difference between terminals is driving me mad. I wasted time checking and rechecking the man page, --help, and Google for a solution because I could not believe that this was NOT an option and I was convinced I must be missing a configuration option SOMEWHERE.

Alas such an option no longer exists and the Gnome-Terminal becomes far less useful to me and many others.

This needs to be corrected. There is no other option nor argument to that fact.

+1 for reasons stated above.

~~Interim Suggestion~~
Even just an invocation option:

    gnome-terminal --icon=/path/to/my_happyface_whatever.png

would be a lifesaver to me!  I suggest that as a solution until
somebody can manage the *interface* trouble of how to have that
feature expressed in the config screen in the friendly GUI.

gnome-terminal's calling options already have things (--zoom?
--working-directory?, plus our best friend --geometry=___)
that are out of the world of happy GUI-set options and
theme-overrideable things.

At the moment, I have a pathetic hack: I set each profile's initial
title (which any changes get appended to) to a text character that
I'm using only as a icon: ¢ § ¶ ¤ » ■ ● ► ⁂

That's what abject desperation looks like, amigos!

But even with that trick, I can't even see the texty-icon until I
see the title, which alt-tabbing doesn't reveal until I tab onto
that window's icon.  It's better than nothing, but the main problem
remains: a dozen identical-icon terminal windows.

Scenario:

Typing 
   gnome-terminal --icon=stuff.png

Yields the following error message
Option "--icon" is no longer supported in this version of gnome-terminal; you might want to create a profile with the desired setting, and use the new '--profile' option

No problem. Lets kick off the profile editor. Ooops no icon setting dialog box.

No problem. Let's edit the %gconf.xml.  Ooops the icon key is ignored and vanishes each time the terminal closes.

Google ? landing here

Am I right to understand that this bug is still awaiting a fix ten years after having first been reported ?

I'm conscious it must be a huge enterprise, yet it would be nice to have it fixed when my 5 years old son is old enough to type shell commands.

One more +1.

Not sure this is still relevant in more recent versions of gnome-terminal, but in mine (v3.6.1 on Mint 15) it is.

I recently started using elinks (a terminal-based web browser) and like it a lot. It would be *very* helpful if I could icon-wise distinguish my new default browser from various other terminal windows on the basis of its particular profile.

In the meantime, thanks Sean (comment 40) for the 'pathetic hack'... it sure isn't the optimal solution, but it helps. (Here in xfce, alt-tabbing actually does show the window title so that's lucky.)

+1

I'm using 3.22 in Debian 9 and I can't seem to set the icon, further more if I set the icon using a menu editor or applications shortcut the terminal appears to override it, which is obnoxious and stupid.

Having a default makes sense. Overriding user customization with the default in all scenarios doesn't make sense and seems to violate linux standards. Would like to see this fixed.