X terminal titles

In the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (pdf) , I recently came across the following snippet in an example .bashrc file.


function xtitle ()
{
case $TERM in
*term | rxvt)
echo -n -e "\033]0;$*\007" ;;
*) ;;
esac
}


The xtitle function allows you to name the X terminal window. I am a big fan of tabbed terminal emulators, but one drawback has been not knowing what is displayed in a hidden tab. Let's say you want to view several gzipped files using zless. First add the following to your .bashrc file:


function xtitle ()
{
case $TERM in
*term | rxvt)
echo -n -e "\033]0;$*\007" ;;
*) ;;
esac
}
#
# list functions that use xtitle after xtitle itself
#
function zless ()
{
xtitle zless "$*"
/bin/zless $*
}


Then the next terminal you open will change its title when you invoke zless. I find this ability to name the terminal window especially useful for editors that run within a terminal window. The last thing I want to do is lose track of files I am editing.