Change Terminal Title in Mac OS X

How can I arbitrarily change the title of a Terminal window in Mac OS X? I have seen this question and this magicwrap thing, but think it's just a simple Mac OS X command.

4

7 Answers

This article tells you how.

Essentially, you use character sequences echoed to the screen to inform the terminal of what title it should display.

title='My first title'
echo -n -e "\033]0;$title\007"

In the above example, whatever the variable title is set to while become the terminal's title. Of course, you could just have the title in the string to echo such as:

echo -n -e "\033]0;My first title\007"

But the first way makes it a slightly bit easier to use and/or extend later.

6

Adding the following to your ~/.profile will achieve the same effect:

# function for setting terminal titles in OSX
function title { printf "\033]0;%s\007" "$1"
}

And then a quick title 'et voila' will sort all your tabs out.

7

Remix of Dan MgG's answer:

echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"

Store it in a file called /usr/bin/title (using sudo!) and chmod it to +x. Then from anywhere you can just type

title 'Trying to Figure This GIT Thing Out'

and you get a nice little title.

(Syntax may vary if you're not on OSX, if I understand correctly)

1

As an alternative to sh-based command line solutions, the OS X Terminal app has a preference to change the title as follows: Under the Terminal->shell menu there is a "edit title" choice, select that and you can change the title easily.

The reply marked as Best answer works fine... this is what i did...

tell application "Terminal" activate do script "echo -n -e \"\\033]0;WorkerTab1\\007\"; cd $HOME/folder1"
end tell

this will set the name of the new tab to WorkerTab1 and then perform other commands like "cd" , etc.

On OS X, terminal preferences are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist.

The terminal's title is stored in the WindowTitle preference.

Thanks for this. I just added a function to my .bashrc:

 function stit() { echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"
}

In my mind "stit" = a convenient shortcut for "set_title". And now when I want to set the title of my windows on the fly, I type:

stit "[new window title]"

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