Auto-setting terminal titles for python virtual environments

Problem

You’re a python hacker using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper on a range of projects. After a few hours in the office and much context switching, your terminal emulator is bursting with open tabs with the unhelpful title ‘bash’ and it’s difficult to remember which tab is for which project. This is making you unhappy.

Solution

Use your postactivate¹ script to set the terminal title when you activate a virtual environment. Add something similar to the following to your postactivate script:

TITLE="codeinthehole.com"
echo -ne "\033]0;$TITLE\007"

Then whenever you start working on a project (using workon), your tab title will be labelled correctly.