What's a good substitute for gnome terminal? [closed]
What's a good substitute for gnome terminal? [closed]
Lately, I've been opening up several terminals at a time. Having to alt-tab between terminals is confusing. I need something that combines several terminals in just one window. What are good alternatives?
"It sounds like you want to run screen in your terminal.
To generate this screen shot, I opened a terminal and ran screen. To split the window, I used the keystroke ""ctrl-a S"" for a horizontal split and ""ctrl-a |"" for a vertical split. To start the additional shells, I ran screen three times in the active shell. To switch between windows, I used the keystroke ""ctrl-a tab"". To change the shell that was being displayed in the active window (""0 bash"", ""1 bash"", etc.), I used the keystroke ""ctrl-a n"" (""next"") or ""ctrl-a p"" (""previous""). To exit each screen process, I just exited the shell running in the screen process; doing so four times returned me to my ordinary terminal.
Summary of screen keystrokes:
ctrl-a S split the window horizontally ctrl-a | split the window vertically ctrl-a tab switch to the next window ctrl-a n switch to the next process ctrl-a p switch to the previous process
(edit: jtimberman) If you have a version that supports it, you can do a vertical split of a screen with ""ctl-|"" (pipe), so you could do 2+ x 2+ screens per terminal. Ubuntu 9.04 has this capability, it was introduced ~version 4.00.03.
(edit: las3rjock) The screenshot has been updated to show screen with vertical as well as horizontal splits. Since the version of screen that comes with Mac OS X does not come with this feature, I built it from CVS according to directions I found on this blog. I assume you could do the same for Linux by skipping the patch steps."
"Please look at my blog entry about tmux found here... That is way more powerful than screen, in short, the config file in the attached blog entry re-configures the tmux shortcut keystrokes to simulate screen, originally tmux uses the Ctrl+B combination in order to not to confuse screen utility. And the keys are reconfigured so... instead of Ctrl+B, Ctrl+A is used:
Ctrl+A for initiating a tmux attention keystroke, such as ? for list of keys, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+A to flick between different windows, Ctrl+A, 1 for first window, Ctrl+A, 2 for second window and so on Ctrl+A, Tab to switch focus between split windows within one session Ctrl+A, C to bring up a new bash shell
"If the current answers don't give you the flexibility or feeling that you want you may also want to have a look at tiling window managers. This ofc is a big change just for tiling terminals but if you are planning on doing the majority of things in tiled terminals a tiled WM may have benefits over the other solutions.
"you could use splitvt to split ANY terminal window in two - one above the other, not side-by-side.
However, while it is possible to split the terminal horizontally or vertically (or both) in some terminal emulators or in screen, you are limited to 2 or 3 or perhaps 4 side-by-side before they become too narrow (or short) to be of any use. IMO, tabbed terms combined with a program like xttitle to set the tab title is a lot less confusing and a lot more useful. YMMV.
other people have already mentioned screen as well as eterm and mrxvt and others, so i'll point out a feature of gnome-terminal that you might have missed.
you do realise that you don't have to alt-tab between terminals in gnome-terminal, don't you?
if you're using tabbed terminals, you can use Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3 etc to switch between the terminals.
BTW, i mostly use mrxvt as my terminal of choice - but gnome-terminal is installed by default on most linux systems so i've got used to how it works. i prefer mrxvt but GT is OK or good enough for light/casual use."
