lostwebsite.net blog

I’ve been using the Mercurial Shell Prompt hack for a while until I got annoyed at it. It caused a Python interpeter to start at every prompt, which is expansize especially if your system is already under strain.

This new shell hack is a lot faster much more generic. This small snippet is used to dynamically set the title of the terminal window in the following situation:

• if the terminal is at the prompt, set the title of the window to the name of the current directory
• if a program is running, set the title of the window to the name of the running program

The code is pretty straightforward. It uses prompt expansion and a magical escape sequence which is understood by the terminal.

case $TERM in
    xterm*)
        precmd () {print -Pn "\e]0;%1~\a"}
        preexec () {print -n "\e]0;$1\a"}
        ;;
esac

This is for Zsh. See this page for how to do the same with Bash and other shells.

There are a lot of variants you can make in the format of the title. Check your shell manual for more information.

If you use Konsole or GNOME Terminal, make sure they are configured to actually use what the emulated terminal dumps. Konsole has an option to set the terminal name to what you want so I suppose the GNOME Terminal has a similar feature.

As usual, I’m not claiming I’ve invented this. I probably read this on a blog somewhere, but I don’t remember where. This is too bad for me because I missing on possible pingbacks. Kudos to whoever I’ve picked this from.

Zsh manual links

• Zsh Prompt Expansion
• Zsh Special Functions