SSH Terminal Window Manager Window Title – How to Fix Terminal Title After SSH Remote Logging

sshterminalwindow titlewindow-manager

right now I am using an one-line perl code to change titles of my terminal bars,

print("\e]0;@ARGV\7");

but every time after I ssh to another remote machine, the title will be modified by the host (by which I'm not particularly bothered). But after I exit from the connection, the modified title remains. Is there a way to fix this? essentially I want a fixed title for my terminals when operating locally.

I primarily use xfce terminal and terminator under either CentOS or Debian. Thanks.

EDIT

Another subtlety is that, rather having all terminals the same name, I would prefer to have the freedom to edit their titles on-the-fly but only forbid SSH session from modifying what I edited.

Best Answer

I don't know about window titles, but I have been trying to have my system do something on terminating a ssh session—actually, after terminating a ssh session. In short: it doesn't work like that. Basically you have three choices:

Write a wrapper around ssh, i.e., an executable shell script named ssh that takes precedence over /usr/bin/ssh in your $PATH which contains the line exec /usr/bin/ssh $@ somewhere in its middle. This enables you to have your shell do some stuff before and after the effective ssh binary is run, while keeping th eoverhead to a minimum.
Write a patch against the SSH sources of your choice to provide you a cleanup hook that executes a shell command passed via commandline or some config-setting. That's what we want.
Have PROMPT_COMMAND evaluate the output of history. Basically a more generic and more ugly approach to 1.

Related Solutions

SSH within SSH displays the wrong machine name in the xterm title bar

Either xterm or the shell on machine_1 is configured to set the terminal title to contain the machine name. Configure your shell on machine_2 to set the terminal title to contain the machine name. You'll also want to make sure that the shell on machine_1 resets the title when the ssh session is terminated. The usual way to do this is to make the shell reset the terminal title whenever it displays a prompt. This has the added benefit of resetting the terminal title to something sensible if a full-screen text mode application sets it while it's running.

You can set the title of an xterm by displaying the escape sequence \e]2;my title here\a where \e is an escape character (\033) and \a is a bell character (\007). Include this sequence in your shell prompt. For bash, put a line like this in your ~/.bashrc:

PS1="\[\033]2;xterm on $HOSTNAME\a\]$PS1";;

The backslash-bracket punctuation \[…\] tell bash that what is inside has a width of 0 (if you leave off the brackets, the display will be garbled).

For more a fancy title that changes after each command, you can include variable and command substitutions in the prompt string if you set the promptvars option.

In zsh, set the title from the precmd function, which is executed before each prompt.

precmd () {
  print -n "\e]2;xterm on $HOSTNAME in $PWD\a"
}

While you're at it, you can set the title from preexec to contain the name of the running command. Here's a simple way which doesn't react very well to unprintable characters in the command:

preexec () {
  print -nr $'\e]2;'"xterm on $HOSTNAME running $2"$'\a'
}

Ssh – Why ssh does not turn terminal title back

The window title in a terminal is set by control characters embedded in the output of whatever is running in the terminal. ssh is oblivious to this as it merely passes whatever characters are generated on the remote end back to the client's stdout. Usually most UNIX/Linux systems which "set the window title" do this by embedding the control characters in the shell's prompt PS1 variable in either in the main /etc/bash_profile or in the user's default $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/.bash_profile (or whatever configuration file your chosen shell uses). This page describes how to do it in a number of different shells.

So, with that explained, then you log in to a remote machine with this stuff set up, the window title gets set, and the reason the window title doesn't "change back" is probably because your local machine doesn't have these control characters embedded in your local prompt to re-set the window title. In other words, once the window title has been set by these control characters, they don't automatically unset. You have to actually output the control characters again to change it, usually by having them in your local prompt variable.

VIM running on the local machine can query the window title from the X server (by referencing the window ID in $WINDOWID) and save the title to restore it back when it exits. This can be controlled with the VIM options title and titlestring (see :help 'title'). The ssh client simply doesn't seem to do this, again probably because ssh doesn't directly manage the window title at all, it just outputs the characters from the remote shell.

edit: Thanks to Stephane Chazelas in the comments for corrections about VIMs title behavior.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

SSH within SSH displays the wrong machine name in the xterm title bar

Ssh – Why ssh does not turn terminal title back

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