Talking about Terminal, we have been working on the same default terminal for a long time. Why not change it a little. Keeping this in mind, we have selected two cool alternatives to replace the default Ubuntu terminal for your basic to advanced operations. Both of them are unique in their own way and serve the main stream purposes as well as some special purposes. These two are basically terminal emulators and are aimed mainly at increasing usability of gnome terminal in Ubuntu.
Guake Terminal
Guake is a drop-down terminal for Gnome (in the style of Yakuake for KDE, Tilda or the terminal used in Quake). It aims to provide a quick-access terminal, that show/hide on screen with a simple key pressing. This drop-down terminal is really good to work with. Install it, run it, set it to start on boot. It can be minimized into tray and can be called back by F12 directly.It can be installed from Ubuntu Software Center or simply type ‘sudo apt-get install guake‘ in the terminal. Simply type in search box ‘Guake” and install it. Run it from Applications>Accessories>Guake. Then right click the tray icon and click ‘preferences’ and set them according to your requirement. For any details please refer “man guake“.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Terminator
Terminator is an application that provides lots of terminals in a single window, saving valuable screen space otherwise wasted on window decorations and not quite being able to fill the screen with terminals. Much of the behaviour of Terminator is based on GNOME Terminal, and they have added more features from that as time goes by, but we also want to extend out in different directions with useful features for system admins and other users.
Installation
Use the following PPA to install Terminator to your Ubuntu machines -
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-terminator/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install terminator
Features
- Arrange terminals in a grid
- 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
Keyboard Shortcuts
Ctrl+Shift+O – Split terminals Horizontally.
Ctrl+Shift+E – Split terminals Vertically.
Ctrl+Shift+Right – Move parent dragbar Right.
Ctrl+Shift+Left – Move parent dragbar Left.
Ctrl+Shift+Up – Move parent dragbar Up.
Ctrl+Shift+Down – Move parent dragbar Down.
F11 - Toggle Fullscreen.
Ctrl+Shift+F – Search within terminal scrollback
Ctrl+Shift+N or Ctrl+Tab – Move to next terminal within the same tab, use Ctrl+PageDown to move to the next tab. If cycle_term_tab is False, cycle within the same tab will be disabled.
Ctrl+Shift+P or Ctrl+Shift+Tab – Move to previous terminal within the same tab, use Ctrl+PageUp to move to the previous tab. If cycle_term_tab is False, cycle within the same tab will be disabled.
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.
For more information, please refer “man terminator” or “man terminator_config”. Any queries regarding these or any other regarding Ubuntu/Bash etc can be asked here.
If you want your favourite terminal app to be reviewed here please leave a comment.
Njoy !
