Change default title in mac terminal window

That’s two questions:

  1. the text in the titlebar for OSX Terminal comes from the names of the processes running in the terminal. There can be multiple levels of processes, e.g., a shell running an editor. Terminal shows up to a few levels of those. You can configure its behavior in the Preferences dialog.

In practice, it can show one or two processes, but the manner in which it constructs the title from those is predetermined mostly by logic in the program (there are a lot of ways this information could be shown).

Terminal responds to xterm-style title escapes, putting the text from those on the left of the other information. There is a reminder of that in the dialog, but no apparent way to suppress it. As you may see from the picture, there is no other way (than the escape sequence) to set the title to something not derived from the current state of the Terminal program or programs running in it.

  1. The ttys000 is the name of the special device through which Terminal talks to the rest of the computer, keyboard I/O and text written by the computer. It is one of several terminal devices that could be used by this program. While you can change the message about last login, you have little control over which terminal device is used.

Further reading:

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