GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 734968
Allow for custom terminal titles
Last modified: 2015-04-13 20:16:04 UTC
Hi! Upon upgrading to Gnome 3.12 on my system, I noticed that the gnome-terminal no longer has any way to change the title of each terminal window. I use this feature almost constantly because I'll usually have multiple terminals open at the same time, and it's almost a necessity to be able to have a custom title for each terminal. Without the ability to title terminals I'm apt to constantly typing in the wrong terminal window, especially since I'll usually be running multiple instances of the same program (multiple gdb sessions on different programs for instance). My guess is that this feature was probably removed because a lot of terminal applications are apt to mess with the terminal title, which is understandable. It would be very useful to just be able to set custom titles though even if they don't allow terminal applications to change the title of the window, just for the sake of making multiple terminal windows manageable. I'm also willing to write up a patch for this myself if needed, I just need to know whether or not a patch for this would actually be accepted upstream.
You can alway set title by escape sequence, it's just the extra menu item that's been non-functional in 3.12 (due to bug 720693) and has now been removed.
Customizing the title is something I really miss. Let's say I want to set the title to be: "nodejs", would anyone be able to tell me how to do this in the new Terminal?
*** Bug 742315 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #2) > Let's say I want to set the title to be: "nodejs" Use this command: echo -ne '\e]0;nodejs\a'
Let's make it clear: [renaming tabs] and [terminal titles] - are different things. Users may need to rename terminal tabs to label purpose for which users created them or to somehow describe tabs in their words. Terminal title is a tty ability to allow running programs change it or somehow additionally indicate it's status. This way, those two things and purposes are different. This way, using escape sequences to rename a terminal - is not valid (not saying about usability by simple users). My vision of how this should be made up is: 1. allow users to change terminal tabs labels. 2. if label not changed by user - show terminal title in what label 3. programs changing terminal titles should not be able to change custom tab titles set by user.
(In reply to comment #5) > Let's make it clear: [renaming tabs] and [terminal titles] - are different > things. I don't think it's set in stone. Konsole, for example, clearly follows your preferred behavior. You can set the tab title to anything you wish, with certain placeholders being interpreted, e.g. %w is substituted with the terminal title as set via escape sequences. It's up to you to set your preferred title, which may or may not contain a %w. Gnome-terminal (and Gnome in general) seems to go for simplifying things as much as possible; in this case it merges these two notions. You can configure the software you use to emit your desired title in its entirety, or not to alter it. Note: I'm not arguing in favor of any of these two; I'm just stating that IMO both approaches are defendable.
What's particularly annoying about this release is that the -t/--title=TITLE command-line option has stopped working as well (despite still being in the man page). I use a startup script to prepare an assortment of terminal tabs I use for different purposes and label them accordingly, and now they all simply say "Terminal". Who thought this needed to be broken?
I use this function to edit the terminal tab's title in Gnome Shell: function title() { export PROMPT_COMMAND="echo -ne '\033]0;$1\a'" } example: $ title nodejsstuff
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 720693 ***
*** Bug 747797 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***