Use Emoticons to distinguish shells

Python shell with Snake Emoji in the Title

One application that has been updated in Mac OS X Lion is the venerable terminal.app which finally supports 256 colours. While playing around with emoji characters, I realised they were quite useful to mark different terminals. I typically have multiple windows open with local and remote shells, along with a python interpreter. Previously I used the background colour of the terminal to distinguish the various contexts, but now I also add a relevant emoji in the title. Among the useful characters for this use

  • Shell 🐚
  • Snake (Python) 🐍
  • Camel 🐫
  • Computer 💻
  • Bug 🐛
  • Ant 🐜

To add the character to a terminal’s title, just go into Terminal/Preferences, select the Settings Icon and the Window tab. In the Title item, you can enter the emoticon in the title text.

6 thoughts on “Use Emoticons to distinguish shells”

  1. Fun mais c est quoi le truc pour assigner d’un titre a ton terminal? Ca manque un peu d’explications.

  2. Nice trick. For those who use a lot of tabs, you can also use the emoji in your bash PROMPT_COMMAND. E.g.

    PROMPT_COMMAND=’echo -ne “33]0;

  3. Very interesting. I noticed that your home directory is not in your terminal titlebar. Did you get rid of it? I’d love to do that.

  4. Ah, all I did was comment out the PROMPT_COMMAND line in /etc/bashrc and the cwd in the Terminal title bar is gone.

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