How to set gnome-terminal tab title. Permanently…

I’ve been looking for this a few times without success. There are some nasty proposals with setting PS1 variable or other tricks with .bashrc mods. Weak and doesn’t actually work.I needed a way to make a bash script that opens several tabs with fixed t…

I’ve been looking for this a few times without success. There are some nasty proposals with setting PS1 variable or other tricks with .bashrc mods. Weak and doesn’t actually work.
I needed a way to make a bash script that opens several tabs with fixed titles and with fixed start directories and with already started programs (for example tail/less of log files). Or solutions are very complicated.

There’s a simple way.

There’s a nice option for gnome-terminal -t “Tab title” which allows you to set a title for a tab. But in default profile (a switchable terminal behavior configuration) any program or bash prompt can change tab’s title. So actually setting tab title doesn’t work permanently.

A good solution is to create a new profile (let’s call it “NoTitleChange”) with options set to not to allow tab change. To do this, in gnome-terminal go to Edit->profiles… click New, apply new name. Then in tab Title and Command from drop box (When commands set own title…) choose Keep initial title.


Now you can invoke

gnome-terminal –tab-with-profile=NoTitileChange -t “My Permanent title”

and nothing will change the tab’s title.
You can play with these and other options to create many tabs in one window.
gnome-terminal –tab-with-profile=NoTitleChange -t “PERMANENT” –tab-with-profile=NoTitleChange -t “TABS ARE”  –tab-with-profile=NoTitleChange -t “AWESOME”
I’m using these other options

-e, –command=STRING
                 Execute the argument to this option inside the terminal.

–working-directory=DIRNAME
                 Set the terminal’s working directory to DIRNAME.

–geometry=GEOMETRY
                 X geometry specification (see “X” man page), can be specified once per window to be opened.

For example

gnome-terminal –tab-with-profile=NoTitleChange -t “src” –working-directory=/opt/workspace/play/mnp/repo/console_gxt2/mnpc  –tab-with-profile=NoTitleChange -t “DevMode” –working-directory=/opt/workspace/play/mnp/repo/console_gxt2/mnpc –command=”mvn initialize exec:exec -Pdevel”

Now you can create start script that opens proper working dirs (with source code for example) and with server logs open. And you’re ready to go!
You May Also Like

Spock, Java and Maven

Few months ago I've came across Groovy - powerful language for JVM platform which combines the power of Java with abilities typical for scripting languages (dynamic typing, metaprogramming).

Together with Groovy I've discovered spock framework (https://code.google.com/p/spock/) - specification framework for Groovy (of course you can test Java classes too!). But spock is not only test/specification framework - it also contains powerful mocking tools.

Even though spock is dedicated for Groovy there is no problem with using it for Java classes tests. In this post I'm going to describe how to configure Maven project to build and run spock specifications together with traditional JUnit tests.


Firstly, we need to prepare pom.xml and add necessary dependencies and plugins.

Two obligatory libraries are:
<dependency>
<groupid>org.spockframework</groupId>
<artifactid>spock-core</artifactId>
<version>0.7-groovy-2.0</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
<artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
<version>${groovy.version}</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
Where groovy.version is property defined in pom.xml for more convenient use and easy version change, just like this:
<properties>
<gmaven-plugin.version>1.4</gmaven-plugin.version>
<groovy.version>2.1.5</groovy.version>
</properties>

I've added property for gmaven-plugin version for the same reason ;)

Besides these two dependencies, we can use few additional ones providing extra functionality:
  • cglib - for class mocking
  • objenesis - enables mocking classes without default constructor
To add them to the project put these lines in <dependencies> section of pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupid>cglib</groupId>
<artifactid>cglib-nodep</artifactId>
<version>3.0</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupid>org.objenesis</groupId>
<artifactid>objenesis</artifactId>
<version>1.3</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

And that's all for dependencies section. Now we will focus on plugins necessary to compile Groovy classes. We need to add gmaven-plugin with gmaven-runtime-2.0 dependency in plugins section:
<plugin>
<groupid>org.codehaus.gmaven</groupId>
<artifactid>gmaven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>${gmaven-plugin.version}</version>
<configuration>
<providerselection>2.0</providerSelection>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>compile</goal>
<goal>testCompile</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupid>org.codehaus.gmaven.runtime</groupId>
<artifactid>gmaven-runtime-2.0</artifactId>
<version>${gmaven-plugin.version}</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
<artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
<artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
<version>${groovy.version}</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</plugin>

With these configuration we can use spock and write our first specifications. But there is one issue: default settings for maven-surefire plugin demand that test classes must end with "..Test" postfix, which is ok when we want to use such naming scheme for our spock tests. But if we want to name them like CommentSpec.groovy or whatever with "..Spec" ending (what in my opinion is much more readable) we need to make little change in surefire plugin configuration:
<plugin>
<groupid>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactid>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.15</version>
<configuration>
<includes>
<include>**/*Test.java</include>
<include>**/*Spec.java</include>
</includes>
</configuration>
</plugin>

As you can see there is a little trick ;) We add include directive for standard Java JUnit test ending with "..Test" postfix, but there is also an entry for spock test ending with "..Spec". And there is a trick: we must write "**/*Spec.java", not "**/*Spec.groovy", otherwise Maven will not run spock tests (which is strange and I've spent some time to figure out why Maven can't run my specs).

Little update: instead of "*.java" postfix for both types of tests we can write "*.class" what is in my opinion more readable and clean:
<include>**/*Test.class</include>
<include>**/*Spec.class</include>
(thanks to Tomek Pęksa for pointing this out!)

With such configuration, we can write either traditional JUnit test and put them in src/test/java directory or groovy spock specifications and place them in src/test/groovy. And both will work together just fine :) In one of my next posts I'll write something about using spock and its mocking abilities in practice, so stay in tune.