Feature request: suppress VT title and prefer profile name (or something else)

[DHowett-MSFT]

"Is it also possible to shown a short title instead of the whole path?"

Originally posted by @wahid in #491 (comment)

[zadjii-msft]

We do have a setting ("showTerminalTitleInTitlebar":bool) that suppresses the title changing. Now we just need a setting for what to display instead of just "Windows Terminal"

[DHowett-MSFT]

That’s for the app, though, not the profile and the tab!

…

________________________________ From: Mike Griese <notifications@github.com> Sent: Thursday, May 9, 2019 6:36:56 AM To: microsoft/Terminal Cc: Dustin Howett; Author Subject: Re: [microsoft/Terminal] Feature request: suppress VT title and prefer profile name (or something else) (#608) We do have a setting ("showTerminalTitleInTitlebar":bool) that suppresses the title changing. Now we just need a setting for what to display instead of just "Windows Terminal" — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fmicrosoft%2FTerminal%2Fissues%2F608%23issuecomment-490907881&data=01%7C01%7Cduhowett%40microsoft.com%7Cf6ac45a35f1748fc090808d6d48367da%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=W002g6JbPl2R4fpkh7MQ3MwdrFD8CoUyU%2Fw8e5j406Y%3D&reserved=0>, or mute the thread<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fnotifications%2Funsubscribe-auth%2FADNHLGTY62Y6IPZQVAER62LPUQSHRANCNFSM4HLXAWHA&data=01%7C01%7Cduhowett%40microsoft.com%7Cf6ac45a35f1748fc090808d6d48367da%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=NCPwxiYHelmT4Xa1PDdbPBNHRuAh013QL0mt06VQEYg%3D&reserved=0>.

[ObsidianPhoenix]

I agree, this seems like a good shout, the profile name property should be used in the tab title instead of the commandline property.

[timheuer]

I'm looking at this (it's annoying to me a bit right now).

I'm struggling to find where the instance of TerminalControl is changing as that's what is happening here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/cascadia/TerminalApp/Tab.cpp#L34 and no matter what I've tried to force the TabViewItem.Header to the profile name, it keeps getting reset.

[ObsidianPhoenix]

Yeah I was taking a look too. I think the initial title is taken from the console itself as it starts up. And the way Terminal initialises the consoles means that it’s just the exe path by default.

You can see how it’s hooked up by changing the title from within the console itself - the events hooked up capture this change from within the console itself and updates the tab element in the UI.

I think we’d need to be careful changing it so that a title change within the console itself continues to allow direct changes from the console.

Unfortunately I’ve still not figured out a way to set the initial value while preserving the events either. It may just need a manual action as part of the tab creation process, but that would hide something a user puts into their powershell profile script.

[oising]

@timheuer -- it's likely sync'ing with VT sequence OSC 0/1/2 (all are treated equivalently in the terminal although strictly they shouldn't be). Fire up a pwsh instance and try "`e]0;new title`a" and you'll see the tab header changes as well as the root window's. The reason it's getting overridden every time is that with every repaint of the buffer, it's emitting the OSC sequence to reset the title. So, in order to change the tab header, you'll need to change state in the VT engine itself; ergo you'll need to emit the right code, at the right time. This may or may not be trivial to do. I'm not that familiar with the codebase.

[oising]

I'm guessing whenever @miniksa gets proper region invalidation working, the title won't be emitted every frame. Right now the entire buffer is repainted with every keystroke.

[timheuer]

it's likely sync'ing with VT sequence OSC 0/1/2 (all are treated equivalently in the terminal although strictly they shouldn't be). Fire up a pwsh instance and try "`e]0;new title`a" and you'll see the tab header changes as well as the root window's.

Interesting! Thanks for that explanation.

You can see how it’s hooked up by changing the title from within the console itself - the events hooked up capture this change from within the console itself and updates the tab element in the UI.

Yeah I see that immediately the TitleChanged event is firing pretty reliably after tab creation (I changed to some hard-coded values as my debugger is not working with breakpoints to follow the code flow :-()

Unfortunately I’ve still not figured out a way to set the initial value while preserving the events either. It may just need a manual action as part of the tab creation process, but that would hide something a user puts into their powershell profile script.

I suppose this warrants actually a PM decision here. I think the nature of profiles for me is that the 'name' I give it is what I want in the tab header (I don't care really about the Window title as I imagine that is going to go away once the team fixes the XAML non-client area situation to make it draggable while hiding the window title). This is how I have things configured in ConEmu with my tabs being the names I've provided for the tasks/shell...makes it easier for me to find them. Path is useless.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Path is useless

For some. For others, the title contains useful information -- the machine they're connected to, how many hops, and what "environment" they're in!

This'll be a profile-level feature, and it might require some of the Tab changes that are going on in #825. They probably clear up ownership of a few of the Control/Tab/App areas.

[timheuer]

Fair enough -- beauty in the eye of the beholder and all :-D. In a heavily multi-tabbed UI experience though, this information gets long and truncated (or should) so that the usefulness fades a bit. Take a look at any heavy user of tabs in a browser. Also please don't assume massive monitors for users and this won't happen -- I'm not a multi-mon user and my screen space is valuable to me.

Either way, having a PM call here @cinnamon-msft may be the right path to clarify desired behavior before proceeding.

[mdtauk]

The teaser concept video shows a status bar at the bottom of the app. Some of that information could be placed there maybe @timheuer

[cinnamon-msft]

I was just having a conversation about this today.

Ideally, the title of tabs will be configurable by the user, either with the path, shell name, name of their pet, etc. all configurable within the profiles.json file.

Additionally, the status bar shown in the video adds another option of where you could display the path if that's something important to you. This feature hasn't been designed yet, so that'll be a little ways out.

[zadjii-msft]

See, I'm thinking it should be either 2 or three states:

1. Use title from terminal (this is what we have today)
2. Use a custom string. This could default to the profile name (if we had settings UI), or the user could customize it to whatever.
3. Use profile name. This one feels like a special case of 2.

If we went with just 2 modes, we could do it in the two possible ways:

1. Add an optional titleText:string string to the profile. If that's set, then we'll display that string instead of the terminal's title.

• this has the downside of not defaulting to the profile name. The user would manually need to set that string.
• if the profile name changes, then the user would have to manually change this as well.
• it might not be abundantly clear that titleText means we'll be using that instead of the terminal's title, but ideally the settings UI will explain this better, and the actual key doesn't matter so much.

2. Add a useTerminalTitle:bool and optional titleText:string to the profile. If useTerminalTitle is set, then we'll use titleText, if it's set. If titleText isn't set, then we'll default to the profile name.

• this has the upside of defaulting to the profile name.
• this has the downside of having two settings the user needs to maintain, as opposed to one.
• could people be confused that having titleText set to something, but useTerminalTitle:false does nothing?

Thoughts?

---

PS:

I don't care really about the Window title as I imagine that is going to go away

The window title will still be used, even with non-client tabs, for the alt-tab view and other shell things:

[timheuer]

I wouldn't personally create a new property. profile:name exists and so early on that you could state this is what it is and where it will be used (frankly the only place it seems to be used now is the menu). Having name and titleText in the profile seems redundant to me and has issues with what you point out (someone may/may not change both). Feels to me:

• add useProfileNameAsTitle and default to false (looking at conemu as an example here they use the exe)
• keep name and make that the displayed value if above is set to true
• if the full shell exe is used, truncate it at least. IMO the full path in the tab can get long and occupies space (open 5 powershell tabs on a laptop). Again, conemu inspiration here just shows me 'powershell.exe' unless i rename it
• OPTIONAL: support rename from the tab (if i right-click on the tab 'Rename' -> then that sets/resets profile name + sets the useProfileNameAsTitle to true

Also, ack on the alt+tab view showing window title. Thanks for the reminder. Personally I think that should be displaying "Windows Terminal - "

[mdtauk]

Tabs at the top, means no Window Title, but Tabs at the bottom would be different.

Then there is the Status Bar which could display various bits of information. Tabs at the top could mean a status bar below the console view, or it could be part of the console view itself, and thus customisable and monospaced.

But then you could have each tab appear in Alt+Tab and the Taskbar Icon hover. So perhaps.

Windows Terminal - App Name / Window Title
Ubuntu 18.04 - Profile Name / Tab Text
Windows Terminal - Ubuntu 18.04 - Alt+Tab preview text

[zadjii-msft]

@timheuer I was trying to design for the fact that some people might want to set the title to something other than the profile name. I don't really know why you'd want that, but as @cinnamon-msft said:

the title of tabs will be configurable by the user, either with the path, shell name, name of their pet, etc.

So someone could have the profile be named "Foo" and the tab text still say "Bar". Or even have the name be Powershell and the title text be pwsh.exe.

[timheuer]

Yeah, we should really define what profile name means...because you kind of already have an internal identifier, so if it isn't the public identifier, than what is it...so I think it really needs to be clarified what name is going to be used for. As you said I don't know why you would want name "foo" but display "bar"

[mdtauk]

Those are just design mock ups I made to try to illustrate ideas as I contribute on here

[fredless]

until this gets addressed, I'm just:

"commandline" : "cmd.exe /k \"title cmd\"",
"commandline" : "powershell.exe -NoExit -Command \"& {$host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = 'ps'}\"",
"commandline" : "python.exe -i -c \\\"import ctypes; ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetConsoleTitleW('py')\\\""

(and yeah I know there are multiple clever ways to do this)

[MCKLMT]

What about WSL? 🤔

[fredless]

What about WSL? 🤔

More tricky but also way more flexible. bash in many distributions (re)sets the window title at every prompt via escape codes on PS1. For example, WSL Ubuntu 18.04 ships with this default in your user's .bashrc:

case "$TERM" in
  xterm*|rxvt*)
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
  *)
    ;;
esac

Pay attention to what appears between \e]0 (literal "ESC"+"]"+"0") and \a (bell or alarm).
Changing this to:

 PS1="\[\e]0;ubuntu\a\]$PS1"

..yields something that suits my needs:

EDIT with a more considered approach: if you're aiming for a static value, rather than setting the title to the same value at every prompt, just set it once at shell init. Comment out the entire case\esac sequence that adds the ESC]0 sequence to PS1 in the 1st place, and just add a line to .bashrc to output the same sequence one time:

echo -e -n "\e]0;ubuntu\a"

[fredless]

thanks for that tabTitle patch - haven't built this yet, but looking forward to removing my workarounds

[ghost]

🎉This issue was addressed in #1358, which has now been successfully released as Windows Terminal Preview v0.3.2142.0.:tada:

Handy links:

• Release Notes
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