How does this script for naming iTerm tabs work?

Question

I\'m trying to name my iTerm tabs and found this link. Here is the pertinent part of the guy\'s post:

I wrote a simple script, which I call “nametab”, whi

Answer 1

I was having your same problem - but I saw the tab name briefly flash before going to back to what it was: the shell and the cwd. Turns out I had an environment variable changing the tab name on every shell command, so this fixed it for me:

export PROMPT_COMMAND=''

Now: echo -e "\033];MY_NEW_TITLE\007"

..works just fine and persists.

Answer 2

If you want to have an alias for changing the tab name, you can actually do it by defining a function in your .profile/.bashrc file like this:

function renametab () {
    echo -ne "\033]0;"$@"\007"
}

Answer 3

rename_tab () {
    TEXT=$1
    export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${TEXT}\007"'
}

This is a function. You can add it to your ~/.bashrc (or something similar, like a ~/.bash_profile). To rename the tabs, you can then do this:

$ rename_tab 'NEW NAME HERE'