Get your tabs together!

(How to change the title of tabs in Windows terminal, when you are using WSL2)

If you are like me, you have a dozen of open tabs in your windows terminal…

Lots of tabs, all with the same title

That’s a problem, cause most of the time, these are not tabs in the same directory.. some are running a background job, some are connecting to servers, and some are different projects.

It’s a mess finding the right tab if every tab is named the same

But luckily, there is a command that helps you to organize:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo -en "\033]0;$1\a"

let’s save it as title and use it:

title "my new tab title"

nice, right?

If you use a lot of 12-factor apps, you probably have heard about direnv, yet? Check it out, it makes life SO MUCH easier. It will load environment variables (or execute scripts) when you enter a local directory.

Given you installed that, create a .envrc in your project and put:

title "my project"

Now when you change the directory to your project (and you do direnv allow . for once), your tab title will change based on the project directory.

You can also change the title of the tab when you execute a long-running command, or you connect to a server

title "on server pegasus" && ssh root@pegasus

You get the gist.

organized tabs ❤