Or you could make a launcher for your app that (attempts to) determine whether it needs to launch a terminal and does the right thing. Something like my-beau

Or you could make a launcher for your app that (attempts to) determine whether it needs to launch a terminal and does the right thing. Something like my-beautiful-console-app ======================== #! /bin/bash if tty -s; then exec my-beautiful-console-app-for-realz "$@" else exec xterm -e my-beautiful-console-app-for-realz "$@" fi might be a start.