Quick tip: Named Terminals in emacs

I’m using the very convenient vterm package to open a terminal in emacs. Now, as with tabs in your browser, you tend to accumulate terminals over time, and you end up with:

• vterm

• vterm<1>

• vterm<2>

• vterm<3>

• …

And as you can see, it’s even worse than with browser tabs, because you don’t have a natural “title” for terminals. You could use the current working directory, but that usually isn’t enough.

So to organize things nicely, you can rename the vterm buffer using M-x rename-buffer, and that’s what I did up until today.

Today I wrote the following interactive function:

(defun pmi/named-term (term-name)
    "Generate a terminal with buffer name TERM-NAME."
    (interactive "sTerminal purpose: ")
    (vterm (concat "term-" term-name)))

As the documentation for the function states, this creates a terminal and assigns a buffer name that you need to enter first. I want the name to start with term- so I can easily find terminals in my buffer search. YMMV.

I mapped this in exwm via…

(exwm-input-set-key (kbd "s-<return>") 'pmi/named-term)

And now I get asked for the purpose of each terminal before it’s created.