OSX Terminal – Tab and window shortcuts

Jamie Hill July 19, 2013

In a previous post, I shared a tip on Naming your Terminal tabs in OSX Lion. I’ve been meaning to share some additional shortcuts that I use day-to-day for opening new tabs and renaming them via the command line.

The workflow

We can rename tabs and windows as before:

# Rename tab
tabname "Funky Tab"
# Rename window
winname "Funky Window"

Or, leave out the name to base it the current directory:

# Rename tab to current directory name
tabname
# Rename window to current directory name
winname

…and to save typing, these are aliased as ‘tn’ and ‘tw’, so this will do the same:

# Rename tab to current directory name
tn
# Rename window to current directory name
wn

Now, for opening a new tab we have:

# Open new tab, cd into same directory as current tab and name it
tab

By default this will open a new tab, cd into the same directory as the current tab and name it based on it’s directory. You can optionally include a path:

# Open new tab, cd into specified directory and name it
tab ./path/to/directory

Of course, there is a lazy version of creating tabs too:

# Shortcut for 'tab'
t

The code

To get this functionality, just drop the following into your ~/.profile file:

function tabname {
  # Will use current dir name if called without arg.
  printf "\e]1;${1-$(basename `pwd`)}\a"
}
function winname {
  # Will use current dir name if called without arg.
  printf "\e]2;${1-$(basename `pwd`)}\a"
}
function tab {
  # Will cd into current dir if called without arg.
  osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal"' \
            -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "t" using {command down}' \
            -e "do script \"cd `pwd` && cd ${1-.} && tabname && clear\" in front window" \
            -e 'end tell' &gt; /dev/null
}
alias t='tab'
alias tn='tabname'
alias wn='winname'

See the Gist here.
Happy tabbing!