Apply different GTK CSS depending on roxterm instance profile

[manuhabitela]

Hello!

Long time user of ROXTerm that I love so first: thank you :)

I'm using GTK CSS to add padding to ROXTerm windows via the VteTerminal selector. It works great.

One new use case I have is I'd love to be able to add my padding only when using a specific ROXTerm profile. Or via any other condition that could fit actually, but I guess this would be the cleanest/simplest way.

For now, I checked how I could differentiate my ROXTerm instances in the CSS via the GTK debugger. I saw the GTKWindow has the window title as "Label". So I configured a new ROXTerm profile that has a fixed window title, and tried to blindly target it in the CSS, like GTKWindow#title VteTerminal, GTKWindow[label="title"] VteTerminal or other things. Without success. Checked the GTK docs and did not find any info that helped me.

So my questions are:

• is what I want to do actually already doable? Maybe I missed something
• if not, do you know if it would be technically doable to add the current profile name as a class on VTeTerminal? To then allow people to target those via the GTK CSS like VteTerminal.profile-name { ... }.

Thanks!

[realh]

I don't know much about GTK CSS styling, so I don't know how or if you can use the window title as a selector. I could make it possible to apply a custom CSS class or name in the profile, but all the tabs in any one window would probably have to use the same CSS in case they change the geometry, which would be the case if you add padding. Without that restriction, switching tabs could cause annoying glitches in the window sizing. The font setting, and some others IIRC, already has such an override.

[manuhabitela]

I saw this: https://wiki.gnome.org/HowDoI/CustomStyle

Tried a few minutes to use the gtk_style_context_add_class function in the roxterm code but I'm definitely not a C programmer and didn't manage to make it work quickly. But my idea was to set a custom CSS class matching the ROXTerm current profile (maybe transforming the profile string to a sluglified version to remove space characters before) on the GtkWindow wrapping everything. That would fit what you are talking about?

Will definitely try more when I get the time if you think it's ok/valuable!

[realh]

I think we're thinking along the same lines: applying a per-profile CSS class to each VteTerminal widget, then you could put different styles for each profile in gtkrc-3.0. It looks like gtk_style_context_add_class is the correct way to do that in GTK3. Does this help: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37628324/1541150? You would have to do that for the widget created with vte_terminal_new.

Your idea of using the sanitised profile name would work and prevent the need for a new setting. Rather than making the sanitising elaborate to avoid name clashes (eg "My Profile" generating the same name as "My-Profile") I think it would be better to keep it simple and advise users about the possibility of clashes.

[manuhabitela]

Thanks for your super quick feedback :) Will try!

I think sanitizing the name is something we would have to do though. Let's say if my roxterm profile name is "my terminal". Not sanitizing the name, we would then add "my" an "terminal" CSS classes (a CSS class can't have whitespaces). And maybe "terminal" is a common word, doing things already. Maybe for some other app a global CSS would be already applied on a common word.

I think saying something like: profile is "My terminal", we setup a "roxterm-my-terminal" class would be more error proof and would make sure there is no issue whatever the case.