DESCRIPTION
xfce4-terminal is what is known as an X terminal emulator, often referred to as terminal or shell. It provides an equivalent to the old-fashioned text screen on your desktop, but one which can easily share the screen with other graphical applications. Windows users may already be familiar with the MS-DOS Prompt utility, which has the analogous function of offering a DOS command-line under Windows, though one should note that the UNIX CLI offer far more power and ease of use than does DOS.
xfce4-terminal emulates the xterm application developed by the X Consortium. In turn, the xterm application emulates the DEC VT102 terminal and also supports the DEC VT220 escape sequences. An escape sequence is a series of characters that start with the Esc character. xfce4-terminal accepts all of the escape sequences that the VT102 and VT220 terminals use for functions such as to position the cursor and to clear the screen.
OPTIONS
Option Summary
Here is a summary of all the options, grouped by type. Explanations are in the following sections.
-h, —help; -V, —version; —disable-server; —color-table; —preferences; —default-display=display; —default-working-directory=directory
-x, —execute; -e, —command=command; -T, —title=title; —dynamic-title-mode=mode; —initial-title=title; —working-directory=directory; -H, —hold; —active-tab; —color-text=color; —color-bg=color
—display=display; —drop-down; —geometry=geometry; —role=role; —startup-id=string; -I, —icon=icon; —fullscreen; —maximize; —minimize; —show-menubar, —hide-menubar; —show-borders, —hide-borders; —show-toolbar, —hide-toolbar; —show-scrollbar, —hide-scrollbar; —font=font; —zoom=zoom
General Options
Terminator
Terminator is a terminal emulator which supports tabs and multiple resizable terminal panels in one window. It is based on GNOME Terminal.
Installation
Install the terminator package. Install terminator-git AUR for the latest development version.
Configuration
See terminator_config(5) or right click Terminator then click Preferences.
User-specific configurations can be found in ~/.config/terminator/config .
GTK customization
Terminator supports tabs. If their size is considered too big, GTK styling can be used in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css on ‘notebook tab’ and ‘notebook tab button’ to achieve the desired height and/or width.
Key commands
Ctrl+Shift+o Split terminals horizontally
Ctrl+Shift+e Split terminals vertically
Ctrl+Shift+w Close current Panel
Alt+Up Move to the terminal above the current one
Alt+Down Move to the terminal below the current one
Alt+Left Move to the terminal left of the current one
Alt+Right Move to the terminal right of the current one
Managing profiles
It is possible to start terminator with a random profile every time. To avoid unexpected behavior, you should start with a clean [profiles] section. You can copy the one from this file. It contains many well-known color schemes. Copy its contents to your config file, which is located in ~/.config/terminator/ . Then, cat your list of profiles to a destination of your choice.
cat $HOME/.config/terminator/config | grep -B 1 'background_color' | grep '\]\]' | tr -d '[]' > $HOME/.config/terminator/profiles
When you add more profiles in the future and would like to have them included in the startup pool, you will have to reissue the command above. You can create an alias.
You must now modify Terminator’s desktop file so that it selects a random profile from this list at startup.
sudoedit /usr/share/applications/terminator.desktop
Find the Exec line and comment it out with # . Add your own Exec line as follows.
# Exec=terminator Exec=sh -c "terminator -p $( shuf -n 1 $HOME/.config/terminator/profiles )"
Save the file and restart your desktop environment.
Tip: Go to the terminator preferences and under the «keybindings» tab, take note of how to switch to the next profile. This way, if the profile Terminator has not started with your liking, you can quickly change it.