How do I display the source machine during a remote x session in the title bar?

Question

In the past, when I open a gvim session on a remote machine, the title bar of gvim would show the machine name in brackets. I am not sure if this was done by the remote gvim itself, or the local window manager. In the past I have used gnome2, although I am currently using unity (and finding it rather frustrating). Is there some setting I can change to always force remote windows to display the source machine?

Answer 1

If the 'title' option is set, Vim will set the window title to the value of 'titlestring'. The first thing you might try is

:set notitle

That should restore the title to whatever the window manager initially set it to, which may include the machine name.

Another solution would be to leave 'title' set and define your own 'titlestring' that would include the name of the host machine. There are some examples under

:help 'titlestring'

and the default format (but not the format string, unfortunately) is shown under

:help 'title'

A simple 'titlestring' setting that would show your host name and file name would be

:let &titlestring = "[".hostname()."] %f"