Persistent Tab Titles

[groundboi]

Hi all, based on this discord help thread, I wanted to propose this Ghostty feature. It's possible some of my terminology might be a little off (particularly, with the distinction of "window" and "tab", as well as discussing terminal "splits" and "panes"), so please bear with me! Or, please correct my terminology/ask if this feature idea is unclear.

Right now (at least on tip), it is possible to use prompt_surface_title to change the title of the tab/window. However, this is tied to the specific terminal that the user was in when they made that change. If, from within that same tab, the user then decides to split the terminal to create a new terminal within the same tab, the title of the tab will change when they change focus to that new split.

If they go back to the original terminal pane (again, all within the same tab), the title will indeed go back to what the user set it to.

The feature idea I'd like to propose is being able to set the title of a tab in such a way that it is "sticky" or "persistent", regardless of whether new terminal splits are created/used within the tab.

The inspiration for this feature idea came from being able to rename windows in tmux, which I always liked using to organize my work so that each window had a name like "testing", "project 1", "code review", etc.

[cassiorenan]

I too find this to be very useful. I have a similar setup on iTerm2: I wrote an AutoLaunch script that monitors the first split of a tab, and sets the title of that tab to be that, permanently. For reference, this is the script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import asyncio
import iterm2

async def MonitorSession(connection, session):
    name = session.name
    await session.tab.async_set_title(session.name)

    async with iterm2.VariableMonitor(
            connection,
            iterm2.VariableScopes.SESSION,
            "name",
            session.session_id) as mon:
        while True:
            name = await mon.async_get()
            await session.tab.async_set_title(name)

async def main(connection):
    app = await iterm2.async_get_app(connection)
    
    for window in app.terminal_windows:
        for tab in window.tabs:
            asyncio.create_task(MonitorSession(connection, tab.sessions[0]))

    # When new sessions are created, monitor them, too.
    async with iterm2.NewSessionMonitor(connection) as mon:
        while True:
            session_id = await mon.async_get()
            session = app.get_session_by_id(session_id)

            # Only monitor the first session in each tab.
            if session == session.tab.sessions[0]:
                asyncio.create_task(MonitorSession(connection, session))

iterm2.run_forever(main)

Why is this useful for me? My workflow is to have the first split of a tab be neovim, with some folder open (a repo, a config dir, anything really). Then have many other splits where I can run commands. If I switch to another tab, no matter in which split I was, the tab title will show the actual working directory I care about (e.g.: the one with neovim in it)

Any way to make this doable in Ghostty would be greatly appreciated.

[rhodes-b]

#2353
(This was meant to be refered to the comment above #7581 (comment))

[pluiedev]

Not really. We could implement this perfectly well without a general purpose scripting API.

[rhodes-b]

I dont remember commenting on this but It seems I meant to put this under the iterm comment which indeed would be scripting

#7581 (comment)

You would not be able to set the title permanently from a script without it

you probably could with the escape sequence to set the title if you left it running all the time not sure how easy that would actually be, especially given that reqesting the title is disabled by default for security reasons

[cassiorenan]

TBH, I pasted my script just as a way to show what the behavior I'm expecting is, in a way that is not ambiguous. I don't have any other use for scripting support (in fact, this is the only script I have on iTerm2). This is why before posting my comment as a new discussion I looked for issues with "title" in them, rather than anything related to scripting.

Of course, I do realize the potential of having script support and fully support it. But just the title functionality described here would be enough for me to: 1. switch to ghostty from iTerm2 on my Mac; and 2. be able to have the exact same setup I have on Mac, but on my linux box - except much snappier and performant.