Customizing Tab Titles in Oh My Zsh

Abenezer Belachew

Abenezer Belachew · January 02, 2024

2 min read

  • I recently switched to Oh My Zsh, an open-source framework for managing Zsh configurations, along with terminal-profile.
  • At first, it was pretty fun, but then I started facing a bit of a snag. As I opened more tabs, it became tricky to navigate to the specific tab I wanted because the titles were kind of obscure.
  • Before this, I had added a set-title function to my ~/.bashrc file (with the snippet of code below commented out), which let me set the tab title by simply running set-title “Title Name”.
# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

function set-title {
    echo -ne "\033]0;$1\007"
}
  • However, after the switch, this method stopped working.
  • To fix this, I tried adding the same function to ~/.zshrc, then sourced it and attempted to set a new title.
  • Unfortunately, that didn't work either.
  • While skimming through the rest of the modified ~/.zshrc config/code, I stumbled upon this line:
# DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE="true"
  • So, I uncommented it and sourced ~/.zshrc again.
source ~/.zshrc

  • And voilà! That did the trick. I can now add custom titles to my tabs with ease. 👍

    working