Name Your Terminals

2026-08-30 - 21:00

You should name your terminals, at least if you use a non-tiling window manager.

I use JWM, and alttab, but I would often lose track of which terminal I’m trying to tab into, because they are mainly all called “st”.

I wrote this script which sets each spawned terminal’s title to one of many names in a config file. I also patched my st build to stop the terminal title from changing during use, as in my experience this doesn’t work properly anyway.

I then mapped st-title to Super+Return in my jwmrc, so now whenever I open a terminal, it gets a name, so I can tell them apart in alttab.

For now the name list is just a bunch of TVD characters, Fallout 4 characters, cyclists, idols and politicians. Writing this from a terminal named “obama”.