GNOME Terminator is a

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terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote ter ...

for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

programmed in Python, licensed under GPL-2.0-only. The goal of the 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). Terminator packages exist for

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OpenSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

, Gentoo, Snap,

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. In 2017 took second place in voting at

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, after Gnome Terminal.

History

Terminator is not a fork of GNOME Terminal (which is written in C); instead, it was developed from scratch by Chris Jones, entirely in Python (based on

PyGObject PyGTK is a set of Python wrappers for the GTK graphical user interface library. PyGTK is free software and licensed under the LGPL. It is analogous to PyQt/PySide and wxPython, the Python wrappers for Qt and wxWidgets, respectively. Its ori ...

to interact with the desktop environment and Python VTE providing the GUI component), but much of the behavior of Terminator is based on GNOME Terminal. Terminator began from vte-demo.py in VTE and the

gedit gedit ( or ) is a text editor designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It was GNOME's default text editor and part of the GNOME Core Applications until GNOME version 42 in March 2022, which changed the default text editor to GNOME Tex ...

terminal plugin, which was useful to the authors for figuring out VTE's API. In July 2013, Steve Boddy succeeded Jones and took the lead of the project. GTK3+ support started near the end of 2012. The first version supporting GTK3+ was published by the end of 2016. In April 2020 the project was forked to GitHub due to a lack of activity on Launchpad.

Features

The following features are available in the 2.x release of Terminator. * Arrange terminals in a grid-like structure * Tabs * Drag and drop re-ordering of terminals * Lots of keyboard shortcuts * Save multiple layouts and profiles via GUI preferences editor * Simultaneous typing to arbitrary groups of terminals *Ability to hide a

scrollbar A scrollbar is an interaction technique or widget in which continuous text, pictures, or any other content can be scrolled in a predetermined direction (up, down, left, or right) on a computer display, window, or viewport so that all of the ...

* Extensible through plugins

References

{{Terminal emulator X Window programs Free terminal emulators Graphics software that uses GTK Free software programmed in Python