Change Terminal Title in Mac OS X

Question

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.

Answer 1

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 just that slightly bit easy to user and/or extend later.

Answer 2

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)

Answer 3

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.