Automatically Setting Terminal's Window Title to Current Path

November 6, 2011

While in hacking mood (read Terminal mode), I often end up using multiple terminal tabs. Switching between the tabs are a little pain as every terminal (at least, those I know of) set their title to some non-sense static text. I wanted to have the title showing the current path so that I don’t have to switch between all of them to find the tab I’m looking for. After spending an hour or so, I came up with something as simple as this. Google wasn’t that much helpful to find this out easily.

Append the following lines to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile or whatever your are using for dumping your bash configs.

 --- >8 --- >8 --- >8 CUT HERE ... >8 --- >8 --- >8









<code>settitle () </code>





<code>{ </code>





<code> echo -ne "\033]0;${PWD/$HOME/~}\007" </code>





<code>} </code>









<code>PROMPT_COMMAND=settitle</code>





<code>export PROMPT_COMMAND</code>

--- >8 --- >8 --- >8 ... TO HERE >8 --- >8 --- >8

Discussion, links, and tweets

By day, I ship code at MetaGeek, by night, I hack on my personal projects, and finally, when I get some off time in between, I also serve as a CTO for ClockworkEngine, LLC where so far we have launched two products - Spyglass and LightPaper. Call be a serial coder if you want.