iTerm

Finally, iTerm has taken over my default terminal application for OS X. It does tabs, and it now has sane keyboard sequences to create and change tabs. It's sort of a graphical version of screen. I've always had some sort of issue with screen, so I don't use it. The only drawback is that it doesn't seem to do bold fonts at all.

Oh, and I found a document showing how to change the tab names using xterm control sequences. I've always had a function to change the title. The settab function is the control sequence to change the icon name. Pretty sweet. I wonder what that does under konsole. Also, I prefer to use the special zsh precmd function over chpwd. This ensures the titles always get set correctly, even after terminating an ssh session that changes the title bar (I put the user and host name in the title bar). Read on for a full snippet from my .zshrc.

if [ ! -z "$DISPLAY" ]; then
    set_title () { print -Pn "^[]2;$1^G" }
    set_icon()   { print -Pn "^[]1;$1^G" }
else
    set_title () { }
    set_icon() { }
fi

# Put "user@host:PWD" in title bar, and just 20 characters of the PWD           
# in the icon name                                                              
precmd ()
{
    set_icon "%20<..<%~%<<"
    set_title "%n@%m:%~"
}