Saturday, March 3, 2012

Terminator a first class terminal emulator


I am enough of a Linux geek to where I use the terminal emulator a lot. So many tasks can be accomplished faster and with less "clutter".

As much as I find Gnome-Terminal a fine app, there is definitely room for improvement.

I especially don't like how gnome-terminal uses the f10 key as one of it's hot keys, blocking use of the much used key in cli programs like Midnight Commander,  HTop and others. (CLI stands for Command Line Interface, for those of you who did not know.)

Besides gnome-terminal's weaknesses, I also find Terminator's ability to split the screen into two three or more panels inside the main screen of Terminator to be very useful.

It's great to be troubleshooting a problem with google using Links while chatting up the Ubuntu guys over at irc.freenode.org, channel #ubuntu for help using irssi, all on the same screen.

There is actually a lot more features than I have listed here.

Here are some screenshots of some of my usual setups with Terminator:




Well that's enough for me, here is what Chris Jones, Terminator's creator, has to say about his unique and useful software:

"Terminator - Multiple GNOME terminals in one window

Terminator  is  a program that allows users to set up flexible arrangements of GNOME terminals. It is aimed at those who normally arrange lots of  terminals  near  each  other,  but don't want to use a frame based window manager.

The  layout  can be modified by moving terminals with Drag and Drop.  To start dragging a terminal, click and hold on its titlebar.   Alternatively,  hold  down  Ctrl, click and hold the right mouse button.  Then, **Release Ctrl**. You can now drag the terminal to the point in the layout you would like it to be.   The  zone  where  the terminal would be inserted will be highlighted."

"The goal of this project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals.
It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, etc. in that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids (tabs is the most common default method, which Terminator also supports).

Much of the behaviour of Terminator is based on GNOME Terminal, and we are adding more features from that as time goes by, but we also want to extend out in different directions with useful features for sysadmins and other users."

These quotes are from Terminator's man pages, and from http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator.

I think that if you use the terminal window enough, you will find Terminator a very valuable tool.

For more information, I suggest you go to Chris Jones's website, http://www.tenshu.net/.

Their is a Terminator button right on the top of the page.

If you are interested in installing it, in Ubuntu you can do so using the command sudo apt-get install terminator. You can also get it by searching for it in Synaptic or Ubuntu's new Software Center.

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