Terminator

Started by Chris Jones cmsj@tenshu.net in 2007, maintained from 2014 to 2020 by Stephen Boddy, currently maintained by Matt Rose. Terminator has had contributions from countless others listed in the AUTHORS file

About this fork (GTK4 port)

This repository is a fork focused on porting Terminator to GTK 4 and VTE 3.91. The port is in progress and features are being migrated incrementally to match the original behavior as closely as possible. See port.md for current status and the GTK 4 section below for how to run the GTK4 build.

Description

Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.

When you run Terminator, you will get a terminal in a window, just like almost every other terminal emulator available. There is also a titlebar which will update as shells/programs inside the terminal tell it to. Also on the titlebar is a small button that opens the grouping menu. From here you can put terminals into groups, which allows you to control multiple terminals simultaneously.

New home on GitHub

In April of 2020 we started moving Terminator to GitHub. A new team wanted to continue the work of the original authors.

You can find the project on https://github.com/gnome-terminator/terminator

Installing

Terminator is available for most (if not all) Linux distributions from the distribution's repository of binary packages. It is also available on FreeBSD. Please search your repository for terminator If you want to find information on how to enable an updated package repository for your OS, build from source, or want to run the bleeding-edge master version, you can follow the instructions in INSTALL.md

Quick Start:

Create more terminals by:

• horizontal split: Ctrl-Shift-o
• vertical split: Ctrl-Shift-e

Shift focus to:

• next terminal: Ctrl-Shift-n
• previous terminal: Ctrl-Shift-p

New tab: Ctrl-Shift-t

New window: Ctrl-Shift-i

Close terminal or tab:

• Ctrl-Shift-w
• or right mouse click -> Close

Close window with all it's terminals and tabs: Ctrl-Shift-q

Reset zoom: Ctrl-0

Terminator Preferences menu:

• right mouse click -> Preferences

These and more modifiable shortcuts in:

• right mouse click -> Preferences -> Keybindings tab

Web Documentation:

• press F1 or at https://gnome-terminator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

More info about shortcuts and cli config in man pages:

• man terminator
• man terminator_config

Contributing

Any help is welcome with the Terminator project.

• Open issues for bugs or enhancements
• Join our chat room on gitter.im for general questions
• Help translating Terminator

You can find old bugs and questions in the launchpad project, but please don't post anything new there.

• https://answers.launchpad.net/terminator
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator

Origins

Terminator began by shamelessly copying code from the vte-demo.py in the vte widget package, and the gedit terminal plugin (which was fantastically useful at figuring out vte's API).

vte-demo.py was not my code and is copyright its original author. While it does not contain any specific licensing information in it, the VTE package appears to be licenced under LGPL v2.

The original version 0.1 release of Terminator was on Saturday, 28 July 2007. Here is the archived Terminator 0.1 release announcement

Licensing

The gedit terminal plugin is part of the gedit-plugins package, which is licenced under GPL v2 or later.

I am thus licensing Terminator as GPL v2 only.

Cristian Grada provided the old icon under the same licence. Cory Kontros provided the new icon under the CC-by-SA licence. For other authorship information, see debian/copyright

GTK 4

Terminator now runs on GTK 4 and VTE (GTK4 build):

• Dependencies (examples):
  • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-vte-3.91 libvte-2.91-gtk4-0 python3-gi
  • Fedora: sudo dnf install gtk4 vte-gtk4 python3-gobject
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S gtk4 vte4 python-gobject
• Run: ./terminator

This opens a single window with one VTE terminal using Gtk 4 (4.0) and VTE 3.91. It is a starting point to gradually port the full feature set.