Setting title doesn't work in terminals launched via 'msg create-window' when instance was created with --title

[hiredman]

Hello,

When I launch a terminal with "alacritty" that terminal's title is updated with the running command / pwd as I do stuff in it. When I launch` a terminal with "alacritty msg create-window" the title isn't being updated, it just stays as "Alacritty"

the zsh snippet responsible for updating the terminals title is:

case $TERM in
    xterm*|alacritty)
        preexec () {
	    print -Pn "\e]0;$1\a"
	}
	precmd () {
	    print -Pn "\e]0;$PWD\a"
	}
        ;;
esac

System

OS: Fedora Linux 39 (Rawhide Prerelease)
Version: alacritty 0.10.1
Linux/BSD: X11 i3wm

[kchibisov]

Maybe your snippet is not being red in this case?

I'd assume that if you manually request to set title with one of those escapes it'll work just fine.

[hiredman]

if I run print -Pn "\e]0;FOO\a" in the shell (zsh) the title of the alacritty terminal window remains "Alacritty"

so no, it doesn't work just fine in that case either

[kchibisov]

Are you sure that you're not disabling title setting somewhere in the config or launch with the --title? You can try default config alacritty --config-file=/dev/null and then create by alacritty msg create-window.

[hiredman]

Ah, I see, somewhere I did launch another alacritty with --title, and now all my terminals are children of that process, and those are the ones where setting the title isn't working.

It seems like either children of alacritty process started with --title should be able to set their own title, or those children should use the title set with --title too.

[kchibisov]

Hm, yeah, you're correct.

I think we shouldn't persist the --title on the CLI for the terminals created with the alacritty msg create-window.

Not sure about the binding though, what do you think @chrisduerr ? The issue is that running alacritty --title foo will create an instance with title foo, but then alacritty msg create-window will create a window with fixed title Alacritty(default).

[chrisduerr]

Should probably be persisted, yeah.

[kchibisov]

Persisted or reset to dynamic one? I think we should reset to dynamic, because alacritty msg create-window has the --title option?

[chrisduerr]

Honestly I don't really care either way.

[shmibs]

making children handle their own titles dynamically would be appreciated here (until then children are unusable because they can't be differentiated in window switcher 😅