Automatically rename Zellij tabs with Nushell

2025-06-07 (last updated 2025-06-07)
zellij nushell ricing

Unfortunately I have a crippling issue with doing ungodly amounts of terminal futzing instead of actually doing the stuff that I should be doing. To that end, I have just set up automatic tab renaming for Zellij with Nushell and it was remarkably easy.

Zellij is a modern alternative to tmux/screen and I'm a real sucker for something modern and written in rust. Out of the box, Zellij has a lot of really cool functionality, but I'm a tmux girlie. My Zellij config is very minimal to make all the keybinds similar to tmux, the only thing that's missing is the automatic tab renaming.

A quick search about automatically renaming tabs in Zellij led me to this article. The author of this post shows two functions they have added to their fish setup. In short, this setup uses Zellij's CLI utility to update the title of the tab using fish's fish_preexec and fish_postexec hooks. In particulary it's issuing a zellij action rename-tab <tabname>.

Nushell also has similar functionality to fish in it's hooks. Combining all this together, we can configure a couple of hooks to rename Zellij tabs wheneve we do something in the command line. This gives us something like this:

$env.config = ($env.config | upsert hooks {
    pre_prompt: [ { 
        zellij action rename-tab "nu";
    } ]
    pre_execution: [ { || 
        mut repl_commandline = (commandline)
        if ($repl_commandline | str length) > 15 {
            $repl_commandline = ($repl_commandline | str substring 0..14) + "..."
        }
        zellij action rename-tab ($repl_commandline)
    } ]
})

The pre_execution hook is what lets us get a string value of the command currently being run and pre_prompt resets the tab name back to "nu" every time we return to the repl. The only special thing of note here is the call to str substring 0..14 which just takes the first 15 characters of the command being issued - just to make sure we don't end up with silly long tab names.