(related: Identify gnome-terminal window by tab title)
When I open several tabs in GNOME Terminal (Version 3.44.0 for GNOME 42) on my Ubuntu 22.04, all tabs have the uninformative title "Terminal". I want them to be automatically titled:
the current working directory if it's in shell prompt (e.g. /home/user123/Downloads)
the name of the open process (e.g. vim ~/.bashrc) in case there is an open process.
How can I achieve that? I use bash, but I can switch to zsh if necessary.
From another thread somewhere on the internet:
function termtitle()
{
printf "\033]0;$*\007";
}
I put this in my .bashrc right above my PS1Update(). Then I call it in PS1Update, right after I update the prompt. I call it with a string constructed from some env flags, username, hostname, pwd. You can put almost anything. I throw in $0. I did try using $PS1, but I use color and I think the printf in termtitle() trips over the escape sequences. So I build another string with the same info but w/o color.
Every time the prompt is updated, so it the terminal window/tab title, like if I change dir, ssh to another machine.
Hope this helps!
I often find myself appending --help|less to commands that I am crafting a command in a shell to explore the CLI of the program I am using. What ways are there to accomplish the same thing with fewer key-presses?
For instance, if I wanted to use the new way of switching branches (I don't, I'm stuck in my ways happily doing git checkout -b other_branch) then my history (and thought process) could look like
git change other_branch # Guess what the command should be
git --help|less # Backtrack to where I am confident I know the command and ask for help
git switch --help|less # Gradually build up the command from there
git switch other_branch
For context:
I typically want the pager either to be able to search or because I am working in tmux and activating scrolling takes a few additional, and awkward, key-presses.
I typically use zsh on Ubuntu or Debian.
I typically use arrow up to iterate on my previous command.
Add the following to your .zshrc file:
# Alt-H: Open `man` page of current command.
unalias run-help
autoload -Uz run-help{,-{git,ip,openssl,p4,sudo,svk,svn}}
Then restart your shell.
Now, whenever you're in the middle of typing a command, you can press AltH (^[h) to immediately open the man page for that command. Then, after you quit your pager, Zsh will will automatically restore your command line, so you can finish typing.
In conemu using cmd I can edit the prompt nice and easy in the CmdInit.cmd file - I do this because I don't like the prompt spread over two lines.
However I can't seem to do the same trick when I select the startup in settings to be bash::Cygwin.
I see that the CmdInit.cmd is dos commands, so I could create a startup.sh? not sure how I invoke it.
Also the PROMT variable does not seem to exist in the bash mode - even though there is a very long two-line prompt. How can I change it? Where are the defaults even taken from?
I was editing .bash_profile and after I saved it ,terminal shows nothing.How can I reset it to previous mode.This is how it looks now.
I changed the value of PS1 variable.I don't have any knowledge about terminal.Please help.
The PS1 environment variable defines what the bash prompt looks like. The default varies among distros, but is generally something like this:
PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '
The bash manpage has an explanation of PS1 values under the heading "Prompting".
You can apply PS1 values to your current terminal session by pressing Control+C several times, then pasting in the line of code above and pressing return or enter. That should get your environment behaving normally long enough to edit your bash profile unless something else is wrong.
If something else is wrong with your profile, and bash is completely broken, you can temporarily use a different shell (one that doesn't care about your bash_profile) with the "New Command..." option in Terminal.app's file menu. When prompted for a command, enter /bin/zsh. You should then get a usable terminal window which you can use to edit or move your .bash_profile.
After some search about it I created a ~/.hushlogin file and it worked, but only for new windows. Is there a way to make it work for new tabs too?
On Mavericks, creating the empty file ~/.hushlogin removes the line “Last login”, for new windows and new tabs.
On my Mac it works.
Solution
This is running OS X 10.8.3. I haven't tested it on other versions, but so long as Terminal has the above option, then it should work.
In Terminal.app, go to Preferences->Settings and select the profile you're using. Go to the 'Shell' tab and under the 'Startup' heading, check 'Run command:' and enter into the box:
login -fpql your-username /bin/bash
Substitute your-username with your actual Unix username. If you use a shell other than the default bash shell, replace /bin/bash with the full path to that shell (yes, even if you've already set it in Preferences->Startup.)
Make sure 'Run inside shell' is unchecked.
If you have the "Prompt before closing: Only if there are processes other than login shell and:" option selected, add "login" and "bash" to the list of processes it will not prompt for.
Make sure you have a ~/.bashrc file, since this will be the file bash uses on startup from now on rather than ~/.bash_profile. I just have one file reference the other using this method. You also need to be sure it sources /etc/profile.
Explanation
We want to run login with the -q option to tell it to supress the "Last login" message, even in the absence of a .hushlogin file. (As noted above, login will only look in cwd for that file, not your home directory, so you'd need a .hushlogin file in every directory you'd open a shell to, for that method to work.)
The problem is Terminal runs something like login -pfl your-username /bin/bash -c exec -la bash /usr/local/bin/bash when you create a new shell (I'm using homebrew's version of bash, hence the weird bash path at the end,) which lacks the -q flag.
Unfortunately, there's no way to directly change the arguments Terminal uses, so we just trampoline a new login session with login -pfql from Terminal's default login -pfl session. Inelegant, but it works.
We need to have the -q option and the path to bash to keep the "New windows/tabs open with: Same Working Directory" option working. If you don't care about that option, you can remove that flag and argument, and probably avoid the .bashrc stuff above.
you could just add a clear to your .bash_profile
Adding ~/.hushlogin is fine unless you want to open a new tab in the same folder, or open Terminal from Finder on the exact folder, in that case it won't work.
Changing a running command to another login is something I would like to avoid because of the strange unnecessary scheme login -> login -> zsh. You can see it in Activity Monitor, but also it will show up when you are quitting interactive programs (like, python repl) in the message that python, login and zsh are running.
Putting clear in ~/.zshrc is not ideal since on mac it just prints a lot of newlines (and if you scroll back, you'll see them).
The best way that I found up to this point is adding printf '\33c\e[3J' to ~/.zshrc (or in Terminal/Preferences/Profiles/Shell/Startup/Run command with Run inside shell checked). I chose beginning of ~/.zshrc file since startup command is running after it and if the ~/.zshrc file is heavy you can briefly see Last Login message before printf is executed.
This might be OS version dependent. On Terminal 2.3 (on 10.8), touching the file ~/.hushlogin suppresses the 'last login' message for new tabs as well as new windows. That is, it Works For Me.
Just in case it helps to work out what's going on (and in case you don't know), note that the 'last login' message is in principle coming from login(1), and not the shell. Or, more precisely, if a shell is invoked in a particular way (including starting it with the -l option), then bash will "act as if it had been invoked as a login shell" (zsh may have a similar feature, though I can't find it right now). Now, it could be that when Terminanl opens up a new tab in your OS X version, the shell is effectively simulating opening a login shell, and maybe getting this detail wrong. But if you have the 10.8 version of bash/zsh (namely 3.2.48 / 4.3.11), then I don't know what might be amiss.
A simple solution without changing anything related to login would be just to add the clear command in the end of your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file. It will clear the terminal in initialization from any initialization prints. It works for me very well.
On my MacOS Big Sur 11.1 it works.