How to set a windows's title in Linux

Question

Is there a way to set a custom windows title in Linux?

It might help to know if there's a particular program or set of programs that interest you. — frabjous, Jan 01 '11 at 16:04
heres how to do it with xprop. https://askubuntu.com/a/626524/378854 — phil294, May 31 '18 at 18:20

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 01 '11 at 16:04

5

One way of doing it is to use xdotool, e.g., from the commandline:

xdotool search --name "Old name" set_window --name "New name"

This searches open windows that contain the name "Old name" and changes its name to "New name". You also search by Window class, PID and a variety of other things. See the xdotool man page.

There are probably other ways of setting the same automatically when the program starts depending on the program, and whether it uses Qt, or GTK, or what.

answered Jan 01 '11 at 16:04

frabjous

10,755
3
34
27

The problem comes if you have two windows with the same name. Terminals for example are usually named like "user:host" – Adrian Lopez Jul 05 '20 at 15:03
use `xprop` then and `xdotool search --any --pid $pid --name $name` – Flint Nov 18 '20 at 13:54

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 09 '13 at 16:30

2

If the window in question is an xterm, you can use a magic escape sequence:

echo "^[]0;New name^G"

where ^[ is the escape character and ^G is control-G.

If the window is the Gnome Terminal, you can use the menu item "Terminal|Set Title".

Another way to write it is

 echo "\033]0;New name\007"

edited Nov 09 '13 at 16:30

Kevin Panko

7,346
22
44
53

answered Jan 02 '11 at 08:42

Shannon Nelson

1,327
7
12

Very interesting! – Ivan Xiao Jun 04 '13 at 17:29
The octal escape codes work in Bash but might not be portable to other shells or `echo` implementations. – tripleee Mar 22 '19 at 10:42
The `-e` is needed for some `echo -e "\033]0;New name\007"` – Sooth Nov 23 '21 at 19:37

How to set a windows's title in Linux

2 Answers2