Terminator 0.9 beta 1
Terminator 0.9 Feature Freeze has come, i’m really excited to see the new features working, they are awesome, but what are this new exciting features?
- Tabs: Now terminator supports tabs, you have different tabs with splited terminals on each one.
- Drag & Drop: Now you can reorder your terminals, you just need to press Cntrl + right click and drag and drop your terminals wherever you want!
- Terminal zooming: This is one of the more exiting ones, have you expect problems when using splited terminals and one of them turns to little for some seconds? Now you just need to press ctrl+shift+z to have this terminal on the whole window and then use the same key combination to put it back on it’s place! It’s awesome!
- Terminatorrc: Don’t like gnome environments? Now you don’t depend on gnome-terminal to configure your terminator, you can use ~/.terminatorrc to tune your terminal as you want it to be
- Titles: kind of confused when using ssh connections inside terminator? Now we support titles, so you always have a title on each splited terminal to know where you are working on
It’s really awesome to see al this changes comming, they make terminator really usefull, want to try them? Help the terminator team to test it, just add my ppa to your sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvalcarcel/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvalcarcel/ubuntu hardy main
Download it:
$sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install terminator
And report bugs if you find some: https://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator
Excited? Digg it!
nxvl @ June 6, 2008
Could someone tell me what makes this so different from GNU Screen that it’s worth giving up detach and the ability to use it through SSH (thus not having to install it on the client or restart a session)?
I’m honestly asking.
I generally use rxvt-unicode and since I’m using a tiling WM (StumpWM) I don’t have to split anything internally usually. However, a good number of the features here are duplicated from Screen.
Also, Screen only runs multiple shells (bash, fish, etc) but not emulators.
Sounds fantastic!
But: please oh please use the freedesktop config spec and put stuff in .config instead of littering $HOME. There’s even a python-xdg lib to make this real easy.
Nikolas: Thanks for the test package, it should help a lot
TheGZeus: it’s all down to your use-case really. Some people like one maximised terminal with something like GNU Screen in it. Some people like tiled window managers so everything is prevented from overlapping. Some people just arrange ~80×25 terminals together. Programs which do all three of these things have always been popular and will always be, I suspect.
Tyrone: Interesting point, I will look into that. As much as blogs are useful, it would be so much more efficient and effective to file stuff like that in our bug tracker. We will get mailed and decide quickly what to do about it. I don’t have a hard deadline to cut a release and am very happy to make important/compelling last minute changes.
I’m not contesting what you’ve said, but I’ll contend that it doesn’t really answer my question.
You can use Screen in any size terminal, so it’s not just a maximised thing.
I mean, I’m always a bit put-off by duplication of efforts and/or fragmentation. We already have KDE, GNOME(XFCE is, do a degree an offshoot of GNOME, being based off off of GTK as well).
Again, I’m not saying this IS that, but it kinda seems that way. Please explain what this does that Screen can’t, there has to be something more than mouse control. it CAN be controlled via keystrokes, too, right? I’d be reading the man page, but I don’t have it installed. (any version)
On a side-note:
I didn’t pay much attention to this (didn’t need it, and it was GNOME-based) until someone filed the Screen/Emacs(/Rapoison/Stumpwm/Ion)-like splitting behavior as a bug because it was ‘different from VIM’;
which made my eyes cross and bleed. Made me think of how many more bugs would be filed if people considered every ‘different from what I’m used to’ situation a bug:
“2 panels instead of 1″
“4 desktops by default instead of one”
“Windows are wobbling and sometimes transparent”
“Programs installed via one program instead of an installed”
“Command-line available”
What it does that screen doesn’t, and that’s why i use it instead of screen is that alows me to see all my working terminals at the same time and doesn’t need to hit keystrokes to see the output of different process running at the same time. Yes, you can make that running multiple terminal windows, but why do that if i can do the same in one aplication?
Screen can be split, and you can run multiple apps in each window, just like this and emacs.
Simple example from Wikipedia’s entry.
it can be sub-divided vertically and horizontally, and, seen here, the running applications are shown as well. The rc file lets you set up the layout and programs loaded in it on startup. it’s incredibly powerful.
I’d be using it alot, but using it within StumpWM would be kind of redundant at this point, as I’m not in need of the detach function much. I basically have 2 sessions open with one app each (different virtual desktops) in part to keep my external disks mounted in the event of an x crash (rare, but it happens) or restart (been trying to get my touchpad disabled).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/GNU_Screen.png/684px-GNU_Screen.png
A little solo research, shows that vertical splitting in Screen is still in CVS (told you I’d never used it) and that version’s not out yet.
One COULD set up this same thing in Emacs with no added Elisp code, but you can do a hell of a alot in vanilla Emacs, but not everyone wants to…
[...] Mas informacion | Valcarcel [...]
I think terminator does a lot that screen doesn’t, and have a slightly different target audience – however, however – it would be absolutely FANTASTIC if Terminator could be used to control a remote Screen session in much the same way, alternatively if there was a server part to Terminator that could be used remotely (I’m thinking one tab equals one “connection”, locally or remotely).
Tyrone: The best thing to do with feature suggestions, is file them on Launchpad (bugs.launchpad.net/terminator/)- that way you are subscribed to them and any progress on them will be emailed to you.
TheGZeus: I think it’s a bit strange that your eyes are crossing and bleeding over applications you don’t use…
Do you think it’s bad that gnome terminal supports tabs when people could just use screen?
I don’t. I think there are multiple valid solutions to the problems of working with lots of TTYs, and I hope that Terminator is one of them.
I don’t really want to do a tit-for-tat feature comparison with Screen, but as you say, Screen doesn’t really offer splitting on both axes properly yet.
If you want to read the manpage, Terminator is free software, and you can browse the code (which ncludes the manpages in the doc/ directory) at https://code.launchpad.net/terminator/
Excellent!
A just reward for your hard work
Love the keyboard shortcuts (which may have been in before, I just hit one by accident), and super-love the “Zoom Terminal” feature. Excellent work all round. Thanks!
Nice work!
And glad to see a little patch of mine in the release
Thank you guys for Terminator!
hello,
thanks for this excellent software.
I change my source.list, i updated but I still have the 8.1.1 version :/
Thanks