How can I launch gnome-terminal with unique titles for multiple tabs?

Question

I've seen various posts about launching gnome-terminal with multiple tabs and the script below is working for me. That is to say, this script will launch gnome-terminal with various working directories or profiles. . .

#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal \
--tab --working-directory=$HOME/notes  \
--tab --working-directory=$HOME/puppet \
--tab --profile=root-beamish           \
--tab --profile=odyssey                \
--tab --profile=root

... but I'd like to set a unique title for each tab.

In the case where a tab has its own profile I can change the title from within gnome-terminal with Edit | Profiles | (NAME) | Edit | Title and Command and then change "Initial Title" to what I want and "When terminal commands set their own titles" from "Replace initial title" to "Keep initial title". However, I'd rather not create a unique profile for every tab. I'd like a generic solution.

I've tried adding --title='MyTitle' but it doesn't seem to help. I'm using GNOME 2.28.2 on CentOS 6.

Answer 1

Use the -t option. (see gnome-terminal --help-terminal-options)

gnome-terminal \
--tab -t "notes" --working-directory=$HOME/notes  \
--tab -t "puppet" --working-directory=$HOME/puppet \
--tab -t "beamish" --profile=root-beamish           \
--tab -t "odyssey" --profile=odyssey                \
--tab -t "root" --profile=root

---

-------- updated at 2011-11-15 22:00:00 --------

So... that worked for me on Solaris 11 Express, with gnome-terminal 2.30.2.

Since then, I've been able to test it on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), which uses 2.32.1, and found exactly the same behavior as you.

In the case of Ubuntu, I was able to track it to the ubuntu .bashrc file. In particular, the section that looks like:

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
    PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"
    ;;
*)
    ;;
esac

In this case, the PS1 variable is being expanded for terminal types matching xterm* and rxvt*.

PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1"

specifically the part between PS1="\[\e]0; and \a\]. Those get turned into the window title.

Once I commented out that whole case statement, the behavior of gnome-terminal with the -t option worked as expected. I'll see if I can find a CentOS 6 box to test this with, too.