Setting $TERMINAL variable mentioned in i3-sensible-terminal

[simsn]

Hi my fellow i3 users,
I just finished a new Manjaro-i3 installation and wanted to change the from i3 used Terminal Emulator. The default installed Emulator is urxvt. i3 by default will start ì3-sensible-terminal, wich will try to open the in $TERMINAL stored terminal emulator. The documentation to i3-sensible-terminal says one can change the system variable $TERMINAL in order to set the preferred terminal emulator.

i3-sensible-terminal man page - i3 - General Commands

After a lot of searching and reading I couldn’t find a liable solution to set said variable. If you try
export TERMINAL=alacritty
from command line, this variable will not hold its assigned value after closing the used terminal window.

This is not a Manjaro specific problem, as there are same questions from Debian and Arch users.

I am specifically not asking for a workaround. The comment on the man page of i3-sensible-terminal suggests this should more or less be a well known standard move.

Please don’t complain about the order: If the user has any preference, they will have $TERMINAL set or modified their i3 configuration file.

Thank you all for any Advice or Ideas.

[ishaan2479]

A better and more popular way is to change i3-sensible-terminal to your preferred terminal:

# start a terminal
bindsym $mod+Return exec xfce4-terminal

[megavolt]

Change the content in

$HOME/.local/bin/terminal

to

alacritty $@

Thats it.

[bill_t]

Open the file ~/.profile and add this line

export TERMINAL=/usr/bin/alacritty

Save the file and logout/login for the changes to have effect.

As mentioned in the i3 documentation, the $TERMINAL variable is the first in the order, so it has the highest precedence in the system for your user.

[simsn]

Thank you for your answer .
Sadly that’s one of the workarounds I already knew of and wanted not to do. I was looking to set the $TERMINAL variable as mentioned in i3-sensible-terminal, so that for example if I open vim , it will be nested in my preferred Terminal
Emulator.

[simsn]

Thank you.
That was the solution I was looking for !

[simsn]

Thank you.
That was actually very helpful!
My terminal executable was stored at /usr/bin/terminal/ as mentioned in following forum article :

Dmenu - where is "terminal" set?

terminal is actually an executable! You can find that out by using which: $ which terminal /usr/bin/terminal $ cat `!!` cat `which terminal` #!/bin/sh urxvtc $@ if [ $? -eq 2 ]; then urxvtd -q -o -f urxvtc $@ fi And you can find out which package added that executable to the system like so: $ pacman -Qo terminal /usr/bin/terminal is owned by i3-arm-scripts 20200312-1 I am on an ARM based machine, so my terminal executable (which is just a simple shell script actually) comes from i3-arm…