I don't have control over the shell prompt or preexec, and I want to keep the titles I assign to screens.  Can I get screen to ignore title-escape-sequences?
How do I stop title-escape-sequences from clobbering my GNU screen titles?
terminal;gnu screen
If you have a terminal whose description looks like xterm, screen assumes it does everything like xterm.  For whatever reason, it equates xterm-titles and xterm-mouse features:in termcap.c, it checks if either the TERM environment variable contains the string xterm or rxvt — or it checks if there is a key definition for kM with the xterm-style \033[M string.if that check fails, (follow the D_CXT symbol in ansi.c and display.c), screen suppresses the escape sequences for the mouse and for the title.So you can do it, but probably not as you want: you could set TERM to vt100 (and screen wouldn't know about the mouse — or the title strings).If you are really ambitious, you could modify screen, to make the two features separately configurable.