Having fully switched from OS X to a proper Free operating system, I’m finding there’s a few things that the new environment doesn’t quite do as I’d like. One of them is the ability to name terminals per tab in gnome-terminal, but there’s no immediate provision for it. So, I’ve written a simple PHP script that injects a title into the PS1 device in the .bashrc start-up script.

This works by detecting the current working directory of the terminal and looking that up in a config file to convert to a suitable title. Either an equality or regular expression test can be applied. This works very well with multiple tab configurations initialised via the –load-config switch.

Since I’m finding this useful, maybe someone else will too! Source code and instructions are here. In Ubuntu you can also create a custom launcher in Unity, with multiple right-click options, using this answer.