Actually I guess my main question should have "Enable title bar API hook so I can ..." prepended to it. Ideally this *would* be a plugin, but putting it down on the status bar would be too tiny, and more importantly, not permanent. It would only come up for a few seconds after invoking sublime.status_message().

If it's an option to enable, it wouldn't clutter anything up for anyone who wasn't interested in seeing it. Usually I have terminal in another space, so I wouldn't have to shift context to make sure I'm in the right branch.