Tmux Window Title – Disallow Window Renaming in Tmux

tmuxwindow title

I'm using tmux in OpenBSD (tmux in the base system of OpenBSD 6.1-beta), and I do some development on Linux hosts.

Whenever I log into a Linux host, it renames the current tmux window. This is what's displayed in the lower right-hand corner of my tmux window:

"root@pelleplutt: /hom" 10:51 17-Mar-17

Pressing prefix–W shows the full window name as

(0)  0: ksh93* "root@pelleplutt: /home/ubuntu"

(this is after having logged into an lxc container I'm currently playing around with).

This is the name of the window even after having logged out of the Linux host, and it's a bit annoying that it sticks.

I'd like it to either (automatically) change back to whatever it was set to before logging into the Linux host, or to never change at all.

I've tried to disallow window renaming through using

set-window-option -g allow-rename off
set-window-option -g automatic-rename off

in my .tmux.conf file, but that doesn't seem to prevent whatever it is that sets the window name from doing so.

Any ideas how I may properly disallow window renaming in tmux?

Additional info:

The OpenBSD tmux doesn't tell the version:

$ command -v tmux
/usr/bin/tmux

$ tmux -V
tmux: unknown option -- V
usage: tmux [-2Cluv] [-c shell-command] [-f file] [-L socket-name]
            [-S socket-path] [command [flags]]

The PS1 variable on the Linux host (Ubuntu 16.04 in an lxc container) is set to

\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$

The allow-rename portion of the tmux manual:

allow-rename [on | off]
    Allow programs to change the window name using a terminal
    escape sequence (\ek...\e\\).  The default is on.

Doing printf "\ektest\e\\" sets the text which is displayed at the bottom left to test if allow-rename is on, but not if it's set to off.

Best Answer

From a thread in the tmux-users list asking about this:

allow-rename affects the window name not the title.

In your output from Prefix+w:

(0)  0: ksh93* "root@pelleplutt: /home/ubuntu"

The "ksh93" part is what tmux considers the window name. It can be set by the escape sequence \033k...\033\\, and protected by the allow-rename option.

The "root@pelleplutt: ..." part is the title. It's set by the escape sequence \033[2;...\033\\, and tmux doesn't have an option to protect that.

To prevent the remote system from changing the title, you could remove that sequence from the PS1 variable:

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