Change the terminal title to include task name

[jaskij]

Description

When working with multiple terminals (such as when using tmux), it's nice to know what's going on in each of them. Sadly, by default, the name is usually the name of the binary - which in this case tells us nothing, as they all simply display go-task.

The idea is for go-task to emit an escape sequence to stdout that includes the name of the task that was called on CLI. So if I run, say, go-task serve -something -or -other, my terminal's title would change to go-task serve, or just serve.

From my research, this is quite simple - it just needs a specific sequence printed to the standard output, \033]0;Title goes here\007.

[jaskij]

As this is primarily helpful for long-running tasks used by developers, such as serving the backend, or just recompiling code whenever, I think it should be the name input in the CLI, not the currently running task (in case of dependencies and such).

[trulede]

@jaskij Could your tasks emit the necessary escape sequence and special variable TASK to do this? It would be something like ...

tasks:
default:
cmds:
- printf '\033]2;%s\033\' "{{.TASK}}"
- echo "\033]2;{{.TASK}}\033\"

That way you can get exactly the behaviour you want. Not exactly sure which version would work, but you get the point I think.

[pd93]

@jaskij Each shell decides how and when it sets its own title, so while an escape sequence like \033 might work from the main shell process in BASH, it will not work in other shells like ZSH/Fish/Powershell.

I'm not sure that this is something we want Task to try and override. It is something that will likely only ever work in certain scenarios and is prone to breaking and/or causing confusing debugging issues for our users. I think this is something that is better left to the user as it is very opinionated.

If you're using ZSH/Fish there are built in tools that let you do title manipulation as and when you like. Not as sure about BASH.