making the frame title more informative

Question

The frame title I can see in an emacs window on my computer running Windows 11 is "emacs@NEYMAN", where "Neyman" is the computer name. Is it possible to make the frame title more informative and reflect the contents of the file? Ideally, I would like to be able to specify the frame title in one of the first lines of the text file.

The reason I am asking is that I am accustomed to never combining taskbar buttons in Windows 10, but Windows 11 has removed this option. When I hover over a combined emacs button on the taskbar, I am shown the frame titles of all open emacs files, and those titles don't give me any idea of the files' contents.

There is a section (C.11 in my version) about frame titles in "GNU Emacs Manual", but I can't see how I can customize the frame title for an individual file.

Answer 1

You can use a file-variable for this, at the start or at the end of your file (as explained in the manual).

For example in a bash file, where # is used for comments, you can set the frame title statically, e.g. by adding the following line at the beginning of the file

# -*- frame-title-format: "new title" -*-

Or you can set it dynamically using e.g.

# -*- eval : (setq frame-title-format (buffer-file-name)) -*-

In a .c file, you can use

/* -*- frame-title-format: "new title" -*- */

etc.