Maximize Your Terminal Usage with Terminator

Terminator is a simple program that allows you to load multiple terminals and arrange them in grid. It is useful when you need to access to various terminals at the same time.

Some of the feature in Terminator includes:

• Arrange terminals in grid
• multiple tabs
• drag and drop reordering of terminal
• keyboard shortcuts
• config file to override gnome-terminal setting

To install terminator, you can either click here or in your terminal, type

sudo apt-get install terminator

Go to Applications -> Accessories -> Terminator

To split terminator horizontal, right click and select Split Horizontally.

Similarly, to split terminator vertically, select Split Vertically.

You can also drag and drop the terminal to rearrange them or to resize them to your liking.

Customizing the Terminator

There are many things that you can personalize in Terminator. You can set the font type, font size, background color, transparency level, background images, and many others options. You can also define custom shortcut key for easier and faster handling of the application.

Terminator with preset background

Terminator with transparent background (Click to enlarge)

Go to your Home folder. Press Ctrl + H to display the hidden files.

Click on the .config folder. If the terminator folder does not exist, create a new folder and name it terminator.

Open your text editor (gedit). Save the new file with the name config (without any extension) in the /home/.config/terminator folder.

You can find the list of customization option here. To personalize terminator, simply paste the option to the config file and set its respective value. For example, if you want to set the background to display image, paste the following code and set the respective value for each option:

background_type = image
background_image = /home/damien/wallpaper/nature.jpg

Setting custom shortcut key

The default shortcut key for Terminator follows that of the Gnome Terminal. If you want to overwrite the default setting and define your own shortcut key, insert the placeholder to the config file, follow by the respective shortcut key command. For example, to change the split horizontal shortcut key to Ctrl + Shift + H,

[KEYBINDING]
split_horiz = <Ctrl><Shift>H

[Terminator]