Comment 16 for bug 1297051

> It's true that we could have defined the answerback response to have a syntax that basically matches the response to \e[c ...

That's a crucial issue here. If all terminals responded in a well-defined syntax (i.e. <some_unique_prefix>terminalname<terminator>) then I'd happily move ahead and hardcode "VTE" or even "VTE <versionnumber>". But that's not the case, even putty defaults to emitting "PUTTY" which you apparently had to change to "PUTTY^M" and it still has the problem that you can't distinguish this from a string typed by the user, or let's say if the user quickly pressed the letter 'x' you might misbelieve that the terminal type is "xPUTTY" and so ugly heuristics begin... In other words, in order to make the answerback useful, the answerback *has* to be configurable because of its broken design, and sysadmins need to do a lot of configuration within a local system to get something useful out of this.

In gnome-terminal (and generally in Gnome) the approach seems to be just the bare minimum of absolutely necessary config options, and preferably no hidden settings. Adding support for the answerback would require an API between VTE and Gnome-terminal, and a preference setting that UI folks probably wouldn't approve. We've already removed more important and more popular options. This is why I don't think this feature will ever be implemented.

Could you go with ^[[>c please, and treat version number of 4 digits around 3600 or so as VTE? Or create a trivial one-line patch for your VTE?

> I could find no trace on the above-mentioned web site, or any other, of \e[?40h being a valid command in a real terminal. I think it might be an xterm invention.

VTE treats xterm as the primary reference. If you want something to be changed, you'd have to prove explicitly that xterm is doing it wrong.