Terminator is a terminal emulator which lets you easily meaningfully arrange arranging multiple virtual terminals in a grid within window. It has a really handy feature which stands out as unique and practical.
It allows you to type in one terminal and send the keystrokes in that terminal to either all the open terminal windows or just the terminal windows within a tab.
Back in April 2020, Terminator has moved to GitHub, being developed by a new team.
Terminator 2.0 release fixes up a bunch more of the bugs from the GTK 3 migration and Python 3 migration, as well as a change of maintainers and repositories.
After more than 4 years of work, the developers have finally finished migrating Terminator from Gtk2 to Gtk3, and from Python2 to Python3, with the latest Terminator 2.0 release.
Besides this important migration, the latest Terminator 2.0 also includes a few new features, like the ability to use an image as the terminal background, a feature that was missing from the Gtk3 version.
The most important advantages of Terminator 2.0
- Split the terminal window into several areas and re-size them as needed. Multiple windows and tabs are also supported.
- You can change the size, color, and give different shapes to the terminal.
- You can type at the same time on any number of arbitrarily grouped terminals.
- Terminator has tabs, drag and drop re-ordering of terminals, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to help the user.
- If you want to use Terminator as a drop-down terminal, you can do so by editing the config file and set whichever key you want to use as a trigger.
- Terminator has a really helpful functionality that lets the user start/stop a logger in order to save the text written in the shell into a file.
Bottom line
Terminator is very handy if you regularly ssh into numerous boxes and do the very same thing on all of them. It lets you split one window in two or four or more. Terminator is also fine as a regular general-purpose terminal. It has everything other terminals have.
