Terminator's tab titles can't be changed

The terminals take their title from PROMPT_COMMAND, e.g.:

export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;this is my title\007"'

Maybe Invalid is a little harsh. I'm not entirely convinced there is a reason to provide a UI method for changing the title. I am prepared to be persuaded if there is a compelling argument.

Right, i didn't explain my proposal good.
Use case:
Rob need to do sysadmining work, develop some internal app, and some opensource. He want to have separate tabs for each one of them with his several splited term in each of them. I will be cool to just right click on tab (or whatever) and tag his tabs with "Sysadmining", "Private dev" and "Free dev".

Ok, I misunderstood the bug. It seems more reasonable now.

Here's a patch for this (against revision 499) in case looking at or applying a patch would be more convenient for someone than looking at the linked branch.

If this is about naming *tabs*, probably something should be done specifically for their titles, rather than letting the user blat the title of any session. Otherwise if you want to name a tab, you need to name all the sessions within that tab; awkward, and loses what is often useful information.

TerminatorNotebookTabLabel suggests it'd even be possible to make it so you can double-click on a tab and replace the label with a text gadget for renaming, rather than another evil modal dialog.

Any update on this? This is an extremely useful (arguably critical) piece of functionality for a multi-tabbed terminal, IMO. Setting PROMPT_COMMAND is really no substite for having a GUI way to change the title on each of the tabs.

Any plans for this soon?

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 2:59 AM, David Rosenstrauch <email address hidden>wrote:

> Any update on this? This is an extremely useful (arguably critical)
> piece of functionality for a multi-tabbed terminal, IMO. Setting
> PROMPT_COMMAND is really no substite for having a GUI way to change the
> title on each of the tabs.
>
> Any plans for this soon?
>
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/246448>
I'm afraid that I don't have the time at the moment to implement a proper
solution - if you or someone else wants to pick it up, the patch I made
earlier works as a proof of concept to work a bit off of, but not much more
than that. If I get free time soon, I'll work on it, but I highly doubt that
that will happen.

I'm playing with this, but it's actually really hard to get right. It is easy to set the title--currently I'm listening for double-clicks on tab labels or title bars, then grabbing the appropriate vte object and feeding it "\033]0;%s\007" % a_title_from_a_prompt. This works fine. The problem is that all sorts of events reset the tab and-or titlebar labels (such as changing focus between embedded terms, changing tabs, or running a command in a term [which ends up calling $PROMPT_COMMAND]). I don't have time to implement this properly right now, but maybe in a couple weeks I'll give it another shot.

Here's what I have if anybody wants to play with it.

I agree with Thomas, this should really be done inline rather than with a separate dialog.

So far I have a little patch to allow editing of the titles, but the TabLabel class needs to be updated to understand when it has a custom name and that it should not then apply updates to it. This will not be hard, just need plenty of testing and some thought about a way to revert a tab back to automatic naming.

I've finished off my patch, you can now double click a tab label to edit it. If you change it to something other than what it was before, it will always stay as that text. To have it go back to automatically following what the shell tells it to, simply edit it again and clear it completely.
This is committed to trunk in revision 705.

Much appreciated, Chris! Thanks for the hard work!

Nice. :)

Cool! Great feature to have, and thanks for the fix!

Just wondering, though: any possibility of providing the same functionality for the title bars on the split terminals within a tab? Right now mine all just say "None 183x32".

Thanks again for the great work!

I'm gonna second David here ...being able to label tabs is nice and all but usually I work on 2 or 3 servers at once in split view and some times get confused as to which server I'm working on.

Thanks for a great application though makes comparing configuration files from two different systems a lot easier!

David: lamo: this will be available in the next release

Awesome! Again, thanks for the hard work!

Most excellent! Thanks David!