This is a more complete solution actually taking care of bash-completion spamming garbage.

To be clear: I did nothing on my own here but research. All credit goes to Marius Gedminas.

This works perfectly for me with Gnome-Terminal/Terminator (put it in your .bashrc or somewhere that's getting sourced)

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir

case "$TERM" in

xterm*|rxvt*)

    PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD}007"'



    # Show the currently running command in the terminal title:

    # http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xterm-titles-with-bash.html

    show_command_in_title_bar()

    {

        case "$BASH_COMMAND" in

            *033]0*)

                # The command is trying to set the title bar as well;

                # this is most likely the execution of $PROMPT_COMMAND.

                # In any case nested escapes confuse the terminal, so don't

                # output them.

                ;;

            *)

                echo -ne "033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${BASH_COMMAND}007"

                ;;

        esac

    }

    trap show_command_in_title_bar DEBUG

    ;;

*)

    ;;

esac

Also this is a cross-post because I just found out about it and wanted to share and I think it's useful here as well.