Ubuntu – xtitle not changing title in Ubuntu 11.04

11.04gnome-terminaltitlebar

I'm trying to find a way to quickly change the title of a Gnome Terminal 2.32.1 window since I have quite a few open and I'm editing different files in each, using a compiler in one, tailing log files in others and so forth. Hence it's a pain looking for the window I want when they all say pax@pax-desktop:~.

This question led me to try xtitle but, for some reason it's not actually changing the title.

Executing xtitle xyzzy results in no visible feedback but piping it through od confirms it's outputting an escape sequence (which I'm assuming is correct, though I haven't checked in detail):

pax@pax-desktop:~/porn_dir$ xtitle xyzzy | od -xcb
0000000    5d1b    3b32    7978    7a7a    0779    5d1b    3b31    7978
        033   ]   2   ;   x   y   z   z   y  \a 033   ]   1   ;   x   y
        033 135 062 073 170 171 172 172 171 007 033 135 061 073 170 171
0000020    7a7a    0779
          z   z   y  \a
        172 172 171 007
0000024

I can go into the menu Terminal | Set Title and change it okay from there but I would much prefer a command-line solution since I can do it automatically (such as create a vi alias which sets the title to vi filename before running the editor and resets it on exit).

In the profile preferences, the initial title is set to Terminal and the When terminal commands set their own titles is set to Replace initial title. There's also only the one profile Default which is the one I'm using.

Best Answer

Turns out xtitle is working fine and changing the title. However, there's a section in the default .bashrc as follows:

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

which sets the prompt up so that it changes the title back to the usual value every time it asks the user for input.

By commenting the PS1=... line above out, the title remains set to whatever you choose.

This has the side effect of not updating the current user@host status for all terminals. To selectively enable this for just the current shell, before running xtitle use:

export PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '

(Remember, you must source this in the terminal, not call/source from a script!)

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change Gnome-Terminal title

Alternatives:

There are other ways however, you can also issue
```
gnome-terminal --title="SOME TITLE HERE"
```
This might not give the desired effect since there is a big chance that your .bashrc overwrites that behaviour.
Bringing us to the last method, which I shamelessly ripped out of my .bashrc.
```
PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;SOME TITLE HERE\007"'
```

As an extra reference, this is the particular line in my .bashrc

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD/$HOME/~}\007"'

You may also need to comment this code out in your ~/.bashrc

case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    # JEFFYEE REMOVED because it makes commands to title() not work
    #PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

Ubuntu – gnome-terminal does not allow changing the title

First, you have something contradictory in your question. You said, "it started to show user@hostname: ~/currentdir in its title, changing it whenever I cd to another directory", but the image attached said something else. I am almost sure that if you've selected "Replace initial title" setting in gnome-terminal's preferences and if you use this ~/.bashrc file as you said, your terminal should look like in the following image:

galymzhan@atom

Second, you're totally wrong with: "vim, for example, sets current filename as a title". To do this, you must to heve a file named .vimrc in your home directory with the following code inside:

let &titlestring = $USER . "@" . hostname() . ": vim " . expand("%:t")
if &term == "screen"
  set t_ts=^[k
  set t_fs=^[\
endif
if &term == "screen" || &term == "xterm"
  set title
endif

And one more thing: I don't understand yet exactly for what do you using that if from the 11th line until 40th line in your .bashrc file, but setting up TERM="gnome-256color" at the line 33 may be a problem in this case. So, I suggest you to comment that line, or to remove all the code between lines 11 and 40.

After all of this done, when you will use vim, your terminal should look like:

galymzhan@atom: vim

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change Gnome-Terminal title

Ubuntu – gnome-terminal does not allow changing the title

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