Add Support for Naming Tabs and Displaying Tab Name/Number on Switch

[BBennettChiba]

I would like to request the following feature:

Tab Naming: Allow tabs to be given custom names, with default names based on their number (e.g., "1," "2," etc.) if no custom name is provided.
Tab Switch Display: When switching between tabs, briefly display the tab's name (or number, if unnamed) in the center of the screen for half a second. This visual feedback would make it easier to confirm the current tab during fast tab navigation.
This functionality would greatly improve the usability and organization of tabs, especially in workflows involving multiple tabs with distinct purposes.

Is this feature already supported? If not, could it be considered for future development? Thank you for your attention to this request!

[haphamdev]

Looking for this as well. goto_tab only support numeric index now. It would be really nice to be able to funzzy find the tab by name.

Context: I usually work with different repositories simultaneously, each on on tab, switching back-and-force between repos by name is critical for me.

[haphamdev]

Wezterm and Tmux support this really smoothly.

[rhodes-b]

you can actually search tabs by name on linux with the tab overview look at this example

output.mp4

I didn't see someone else commented this below
#3709 (comment)

[EngineersBox]

Adding to this, It might be handy to support a dotfile in a directory such as .tabconf which can specify the name of the tab programmatically, and determine if it should apply to all child directories if another .tabconf doesn't exist in the child path. I Added a similar thing to my kitty install so that I could name each project without needing to manually alter the tab name each time.

This may well be something that should be supported via some kind of extension via the up and coming library for the terminal, but I think it's worth noting as part of this discussion.

[rhodes-b]

#2353 will let you programatically control ghostty I think this covers your usecase

[goproslowyo]

Tab Switch Display

macOS has a native tab overview mode cmd+shift+\ and then you can search the titles just by typing.
On Linux libadwaita (iirc) gives us a tab overview toggle. You need to bind toggle_tab_overview to any combo you'd like and then you have built-in search based on tab title as well.

No tab naming features here, that is to say. YMMV but hope this helps everyone's use cases a little bit.

[zhephree]

I usually have different environments open in each tab (local, dev, staging, prod) and naming them and/or color-coding the tabs would be a huge help to differentiate between environments

[ghost]

I reckon a new discussion or an issue, this is really important!

[0xrusowsky]

fyi there is already some wip on #2509

[tkolleh]

Is there a way to specify the directory and command with these changes? e.g. nvim ~/.config/

[tonykay]

Yes I really miss this from iTerm (plus the ability to write a badge say top right hand corner).

My so so compromise is to run tmux in every tab and then the session title appears: eg tmux new-session -t showroom-llamastack gives me

[devjona]

I had an iTerm setup/profile for different Rails apps at my job with tabs like this:
|rails s| rails c | psql | test | git | k9s | extra | and they were color-coded. It was nice to be able to have that consistently so I could stay organized in my workflow.

[rhodes-b]

Macos already shows the tab index - shows this a couple of days after release #3948 (which requests to be able to turn them off)

You can also name tabs already - this only exists on the main branch (you can even rename the tab from the command pallete on macos im not sure of the command pallete state on linux / what it supports I know there is a PR close to being merged last I checked)
#4217 (initial tab renaming support macos)
#5905 (initial tab renaming support linux)

the only thing I think does not exist here is displaying only on a switch context (afaik ghostty does not have this concept anyways it seems like you want a different implementation than than the tab overview modes)

Also fwiw this has 2 separate feature requests (as such it should have been 2 separate discussions)
naming tabs - this is done
a different switch context which displays the tab number (since tab overviews aren't what you are looking for)

I don't know how the tab overview works on macos but like I commented above you can even search by tab name on linux
#3709 (reply in thread)

now a question why does not always showing a tab number not satisfy this case? (besides the argument of "visual clutter" which many people care a bit too much about)

[devjona]

As an example:

I had an iTerm setup/profile for different Rails apps at my job with tabs like this:
|rails s| rails c | psql | test | git | k9s | extra | and they were color-coded. It was nice to be able to have that consistently so I could stay organized in my workflow.

If this feature doesn't exist, it'd be great if we could add it.

[stabildev]

renaming tabs would be very helpful when running multiple instances of the same tool

[rhodes-b]

you can already do this on tip

[00-kat]

prompt_surface_title for completeness.

[cespare]

To be clear, that names the surface (i.e., split), not the whole tab. If you don't use splits, then they're basically the same. But if you do use splits, then that feature doesn't really cut it.

[rhodes-b]

To be clear, that names the surface (i.e., split), not the whole tab. If you don't use splits, then they're basically the same. But if you do use splits, then that feature doesn't really cut it.

#7581
is another request for this that is more specific about the prompt_surface_title being applied to a tab and not splits.
(like stated above this is also requesting 2 separate features so it should also be 2 separate requests)

[tobiaskraus]

You can change the name of your surface (which is basically your tab when you didn't split, if I'm not mistaken). This feature exists since version 1.2.0 (Sept 2025).

Open your Settings and assign it some keybinding. For example CMD+r:

keybind = cmd+r=prompt_surface_title

Restart Ghostty and then it looks like this:

[mirandaio]

I usually have multiple splits in a tab (text editor, logs, etc). When selecting "Change Terminal Title" from the command palette, it only changes the title for the currently focused split. Is there a way to change the tile for the whole tab so that I don't have to change the title of every split within the tab?

[cespare]

@mirandaio You should upvote #7581 as well. (Ever since split naming was added, there has been a lot of confusion where people asking for tab naming have been told "it has already been implemented!"...)

[shayne]

I discovered "Change Title" by right clicking in the terminal window. I had previously tried right clicking on the tab itself, expecting it to be there. It would be great to add it to the context menu for the tab itself. Perhaps, even double clicking the existing title lets you edit it. (macOS)