Faruk Ahmad AI Engineer

How to set title to your ubuntu terminal for specific task?

2022-08-16
Linux-Config
   

Why needed?

Why do you need to set title to your terminal window?

Let me explain briefly.

If you are working on multiple tasks, and need to check progress of the running task after a while, then setting up terminal window title will help you to easily switch between terminal windows.

Another use cases might be, if you are trying to train multipel machine learning models with different paremeters for same task, then setting up temrinal window title will help you to distinguish between which window is running which instance of your training task. Otherwise, after a few epochs are run, it will be difficult to understand which experiment is running in which window.

So, let’s see, how you can set window title with few lines of code-

Steps Required

Step#1

Open .bashrc file with any text editor.

sudo nano ~/.bashrc

Step#2

Add the following function at the bottom of the .bashrc content. We are going to tweak with PS1 for setting window title.

Copy the bellow code & paste in .bashrc file-

function set-title() {
  if [[ -z "$ORIG" ]]; then
    ORIG=$PS1
  fi
  TITLE="\[\e]2;$*\a\]"
  PS1=${ORIG}${TITLE}
}

Save & exit the text editor.

Step#3

Reload the .bashrc profile by running the following command-

source ~/.bashrc

Step#4

Now to set a title to a terminal window, run the following command-

set-title "Window Title You Want to Set"

You will see the given title in the terminal window like the bellow image-

terminal title

N.B. This approach is tested in Ubuntu 16.04, 20.04 & Gnome environment. Might not work in other systems. Please check your system environment before running this task.

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