Sorry, I don't see a bug in Node here. The process.title sets the entire window title, if you want it to add a suffix then you have to do this manually:

const originalTitle= process.title
process.title = `${originalTitle} - Reticulating splines`

if you want your app to restore the title when it exits - then again, you have to do it manually:

process.title = originalTitle

If you are unhappy with how some tools use process.title - which I completely understand and 100% agree with you - then you should bring this up in the issue tracker for that specific tool. Here Node just does whats it is told to do.

Yeah, I suspected I would get this response. I had an issue all queued up in Angular CLI's tracker, but had a feeling they would tell me it's Node's problem.

It still feels to me like Node is doing something non-standard if I have to go to every tool that's using Node and tell them they're using it wrong.

Concatenating the titles to get an OS specific behaviour feels more like something Node should be doing, and not the responsibility of all the tools using Node. Ironically, it works perfectly if the tool doesn't even use process.title, so maybe that's what I should be telling them.

If the tool does not touch process.title then the console title won't change. If the app wants to change the tile, it does this explicitly. Even if Node would only allow adding suffixes to the title, then - besides a lot of people complaining - someone will make a workaround for this using spawn(`title ${newTitle}`) and we are back where we started.