Tmux and ZSH custom prompt : bug with window name

I took a peek at oh-my-zsh and found a likely suspect.

When the value of the TERM environment variable starts with screen (which it should under both screen and tmux), it uses a screen terminal control sequence to set the window’s name to

  • (just before displaying a shell prompt)
    the left-most portion of the “tilde compressed” path of the current working directory (.. followed by the last 13 characters or the entire path if it less than 15 characters) and
  • (just before starting a command)
    the first “word” of about-to-be-run command (not counting ssh, sudo, and a few others).

It sounds like it is working this way for you (you said that your window named changed to ~/docs when you were in that directory). If you want to disable this automatic renaming, you can can disable it completely by setting the DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE shell parameter to true in your .zshrc:

DISABLE_AUTO_TITLE=true

If you just set this in an interactive shell, you will end up with an empty string for the current window’s name, but oh-my-zsh will stop updating the window before each prompt and command in that shell instance (it needs to be in your .zshrc to affect all new shell instances).


I know that the answer above gives you a solution, but another one is to simply add this option your the ~/.tmux.conf

set-option -g allow-rename off

I met the same issue, which is tmux's window name was changed even by setting in .tmux.conf:

set-window-option -g automatic-rename off

Thanks Chris's answer. My tmux window name wasn't renamed automatically after I changed:

set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

to:

set -g default-terminal "xterm-256color"