Using Terminator

29 Jun 2023 - rich

Terminator was originally developed by Chris Jones in 2007 as a simple, 300-ish line python script. Since then, it has become The Robot Future of Terminals. Originally inspired by projects like quadkonsole and gnome-multi-term and more recently by projects like Iterm2, and Tilix, It lets you combine and recombine terminals to suit the style you like. If you live at the command-line, or are logged into 10 different remote machines at once, you should definitely try out Terminator.

When you run Terminator, you will get a terminal in a window, just like almost every other terminal emulator available. There is also a titlebar which will update as shells/programs inside the terminal tell it to. Also on the titlebar is a small button that opens the grouping menu. From here you can put terminals into groups, which allows you to control multiple terminals simultaneously.

Terminator on Github

In April of 2020 we started moving Terminator to GitHub. A new team wanted to continue the work of the original authors.

You can find the project on https://github.com/gnome-terminator/terminator

Quick Start:

Create more terminals by:

horizontal split: Ctrl-Shift-o
vertical split: Ctrl-Shift-e

Shift focus to:

next terminal: Ctrl-Shift-n
previous terminal: Ctrl-Shift-p

New tab: Ctrl-Shift-t

New window: Ctrl-Shift-i

Close terminal or tab:

Ctrl-Shift-w
or right mouse click -> Close

Close window with all it’s terminals and tabs: Ctrl-Shift-q

Reset zoom: Ctrl-0

Terminator Preferences menu:

right mouse click -> Preferences

These and more modifiable shortcuts in:

right mouse click -> Preferences -> Keybindings tab

Web Documentation:

press F1 or at https://gnome-terminator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

More info about shortcuts and cli config in man pages:

man terminator
man terminator_config