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I have 2 laptops, A and B, same OS (ubuntu 18.04). My gnome terminal tab titles on A always show current path in the tab, whereas B show it the one I tell it via the tt and ntt commands I discuss in another question of mine. I have tried 

echo -ne "\033]0;MY TITLE\007"'

and 

PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;MY TITLE\007"'

and 

gnome-terminal --title="MY TITLE HERE"

but nothing works, it keeps showing the current folder in tab title. Whereas on laptop B, the same commands work! This is a slightliy different question from How to change Gnome-Terminal title?, because none of the 3 techniques above work.

I remember fiddling around with this a few weeks ago, I must have put something in place that dynamically updates the title every time there is a new prompt, so when I try the echo -ne, it immediately gets overwritten. The env commands shows that there is no PS1 or PROMPT_COMMAND already in place.

Any ideas how to fix this so that echo -ne works again? Is there like a settings file for gnome terminal, it loads every time it starts?

Oliver
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1 Answers1

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Thanks @wjandrea you were right on with your first comment, and darn close with your second one. So it may be useful to others to know that other than the 3 techniques mentioned in my question, there may be a PS1 sneakily set in your .bashrc. Indeed:

  1. An env|grep PS1 will never show PS1; instead use echo $PS1 or declare -p PS1 similarly for PROMPT_COMMAND.
  2. Once I used correct query, I found that PS1 was set with an esc sequence 0, which sets title on tab.

  3. Then I looked in my .bashrc and sure enough the bit of code discussed in Ward's answer was there; the block 

    case "$TERM" in 
  xterm*...

    prepends the magical arcane esc 0 sequence that sets title, thus preventing any of the other techniques from working!

  4. Uncommenting it allowed me to use the tt and ntt commands I mention in my older question.
Oliver
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