Rename Terminal Tabs in Mac OS X

Jul 20, 2012 - 10 Comments

Terminal Having a bunch of Terminal tabs named “bash” “bash” and “bash” isn’t too useful or descriptive. Instead, you can rename each tab individually to something more specific by using the Terminal inspector.

Before doing so, keep in mind that tabs default to rename themselves automatically based on the currently running process, thus if the terminal tab is running ‘top’ it will rename itself as ‘top’ and so forth. Choosing to rename the tab this way prepends the process name within the tab name.

How to Rename Terminal Tabs on Mac

Remember, you can open a new Terminal tab by hitting Command+T within the Terminal app. After you have a few tabs open, here’s how to rename a tab in the Mac OS X Terminal:

  1. From any multi-tabbed Terminal window, hit Shift+Command+i, or pull down the “Shell” menu and select “Edit Title” to bring up the Terminal Inspector window
  2. From here you can either rename the tab name, or even the Terminal window itself
  3. Repeat with other tabs / windows as desired

Here’s an example of what this may look like with renamed and more descriptive tabs:

Rename Terminal Tabs

Name tabs by location, category, purpose, usage, whatever you go with will probably be easier to identify at a glance than the default option, particularly if you have a bunch of shell windows or tabs open that otherwise aren’t too descriptive with their naming convention..

Thanks for the quick tip AJ

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Related articles:

Posted by: William Pearson in Command Line, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

10 Comments

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  1. Aditya says:

    A much better solution is to use command line to open the new tabs with a name using the ttab utility:

    ttab -t ‘myawesome terminal name’

  2. Oleg says:

    Exactly what I needed 2 years!..

  3. Dipesh says:

    Useless solution. Moment you hit any command or even enter the title changes back to original. Facepalm.

  4. D says:

    This is a pretty useless feature. Once you run a command on the window the name reverts.

  5. Tzunamii says:

    Here’s a quicker way to do it once you have added it into your ~/.bashrc

    # Set the title of the terminal window
    # Usage: settitle
    function settitle() {

    echo -e “33]0;$107”
    }

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