By default, your terminal emulator (Gnome Terminal, Terminator, etc.) sets some kind of window title to reflect the shell type you are running (e.g. /bin/bash).
This is most often not too helpful, but you can change that from your shell.
To set a specific title, print an escape sequence like this:
echo -en "\033]0;Hello\a"
You can easily include the current path:
echo -en "\033]0;$(pwd)\a"
Or, to replace your home directory's part with a tilde:
echo -en "\033]0;$(pwd | sed -e "s;^$HOME;~;")\a"
Or, to only show the directory name without a path:
echo -en "\033]0;$(basename `pwd`)\a"
Bash
To make your Bash automatically update your window title whenever you switch directories, simply specify a PROMPT_COMMAND environment variable.
set-window-title() {
echo -en "\033]0;$(pwd | sed -e "s;^$HOME;~;")\a"
}
if [[ "$PROMPT_COMMAND" ]]; then
export PROMPT_COMMAND="$PROMPT_COMMAND;set-window-title"
else
export PROMPT_COMMAND=set-window-title
fi
You may put that into your ~/.bashrc to persist and automatically activate when you open a new terminal window.
ZSH
To make your Bash automatically update your window title whenever you switch directories, add the following line to your precmd function in the ~/.zshrc. In case your are using oh-my-zsh you need to set DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE="true".
function precmd () {
echo -ne "\033]0;$(pwd | sed -e "s;^$HOME;~;")\a"
}
