Terminator: A Kick-ass Terminal

May 7, 2008

I thought tabs were great.  In reality, they’re useful for some things — web browsing and file managing come to mind.  But when it comes to working in a terminal, it’s really tedious to have to flip back and forth between tabs in your terminal emulator.  Things get lost, you forget which machine is which, and on and on.

One thing I always liked about GNU Screen is that you could split the window up, however rarely I used that feature.  But Terminator brings that functionality in a clean way to Gnome-Terminal, and you’ll never believe how much it boosts your productivity!  These days, with large displays and dual-monitor setups more common, it just makes sense to be able to divide your terminal any way you see fit.  Comparing output of commands, working with multiple machines, whatever your task might be — it’s easier than ever with this little add-on app.

Terminator is built off Gnome-Terminal, which means you still manage your terminal preferences through its interface.  The options you’ll find in Terminator itself are pretty bare-bones — but I like it that way.  Right clicking on the main window gives you a few succinct options:

• Copy / Paste
• Show Scrollbar
• Split Horizontally
• Split Vertically
• Close

There’s not much more to ask for once you have the look and feel right.  It might be nice to be able to edit preferences directly from Terminal, but I don’t find myself digging around in terminal emulator options too much anyway once I have my main look and feel set up the way I like (white text on black blackground, please).

On Ubuntu, it’s an apt-get install terminator away.  For other distros, see its home page, here.

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