Terminator (terminal emulator) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Terminator is a GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

terminal emulator

Terminal emulator

A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....

. It is available on Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

and other Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

X11

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

systems. Terminator will run on any modern POSIX

POSIX

POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

system with Java 5

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

or later.

Terminator was originally written by Phil Norman, who produced a more-or-less usable replacement for rxvt

Rxvt

rxvt is a terminal emulator for the X Window System , originally written by Rob Nation and later extensively modified by Mark Olesen, who took over maintenance for several years...

on his own between 2004-04-21 and 2004-05-28; roughly a month of development time. Elliott Hughes took Phil's terminal emulation and used it as a base upon which he could experiment with advanced terminal emulator

Terminal emulator

A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....

features and continues to actively develop Terminator. Martin Dorey ported Terminator to Cygwin

Cygwin

Cygwin is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment...

, making Terminator one of the few terminal emulators available on Windows and Unix platforms.

Features

Automatic Logging - Complete logs are automatically generated of all of the user's terminal sessions.
Drag & Drop
Drag-and-drop
In computer graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop is the action of selecting a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object...

- Text
Plain text
In computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text....

and URLs
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

, and even files from Finder
Macintosh Finder
The Finder is the default file manager used on Mac OS and Mac OS X operating systems; it is responsible for the overall user-management of files, disks, network volumes and the launching of other applications...

/Nautilus
Nautilus (file manager)
Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 and was the default from version 2.0 onwards....

/Windows Explorer
Windows Explorer
This article is about the Windows file system browser. For the similarly named web browser, see Internet ExplorerWindows Explorer is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface...

can be dropped on Terminator to be inserted as text, with automatic quoting of filenames containing shell
Shell (computing)
A shell is a piece of software that provides an interface for users of an operating system which provides access to the services of a kernel. However, the term is also applied very loosely to applications and may include any software that is "built around" a particular component, such as web...

meta-characters.
Find - Terminator provides you with a find function so users can search for text and regular expressions within their terminal (including the scrollback), highlighting them all, in the style of less
Less (Unix)
less is a terminal pager program on Unix, Windows, and Unix-like systems used to view the contents of a text file one screen at a time. It is similar to more, but has the extended capability of allowing both forward and backward navigation through the file...

, and offering quick movement to the next or previous match.
Horizontal Scrolling
Scrolling
In computer graphics, filmmaking, television production, and other kinetic displays, scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display. "Scrolling", as such, does not change the layout of the text or pictures, or but incrementally moves the user's view across what is...

- Most terminal emulators wrap text when it intrudes upon the right margin. Terminator instead provides a horizontal scrollbar
Scrollbar
A scrollbar is an object in a graphical user interface with which continuous text, pictures or anything else can be scrolled including time in video applications, i.e., viewed even if it does not fit into the space in a computer display, window, or viewport...

when necessary.
Multiple Tabs
Tab (GUI)
In the area of graphical user interfaces , a tabbed document interface is one that allows multiple documents to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents...

- Like tabbed browsing
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

, only with terminals, tabbed terminals.
Number Reinterpretation - Terminator will recognize numbers in a variety of bases
Radix
In mathematical numeral systems, the base or radix for the simplest case is the number of unique digits, including zero, that a positional numeral system uses to represent numbers. For example, for the decimal system the radix is ten, because it uses the ten digits from 0 through 9.In any numeral...

as the current selection, and add informational menu items to the pop-up menu
Context menu
A context menu is a menu in a graphical user interface that appears upon user interaction, such as a right mouse click or middle click mouse operation...

showing the same number in other bases. No more man ascii
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

or resorting to bc
Bc programming language
bc, for bench calculator, is "an arbitrary precision calculator language" with syntax similar to the C programming language. bc is typically used as either a mathematical scripting language or as an interactive mathematical shell....

.
Portability - Written mostly in Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, with a small POSIX
POSIX
POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

part (for pseudo-terminal support) and a Ruby
Ruby (programming language)
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

invocation script
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...

, Terminator should compile out of the box on most modern desktop
Desktop computer
A desktop computer is a personal computer in a form intended for regular use at a single location, as opposed to a mobile laptop or portable computer. Early desktop computers are designed to lay flat on the desk, while modern towers stand upright...

operating systems.
Tab
Tab key
Tab key on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop.- Origin :The word tab derives from the word tabulate, which means "to arrange data in a tabular, or table, form"...

Character Handling - Many terminal emulators translate tab characters into strings of spaces. If a section of text is then copied or pasted from the terminal into a text editor
Text editor
A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code....

, it appears as spaces rather than tabs; Terminator remembers them as tab characters.
Unlimited Scrollback - Terminator does not throw away output when it scrolls off the top of the screen, nor when it reaches any arbitrary limit. The user must manually clear the scrollback.
Intelligent Vertical Scrolling - Terminator's scrollbar won't keep jumping when there's output if you've deliberately scrolled back to look at part of the history, but as soon as you scroll back to the bottom again, it will resume auto-scrolling.
Safe Quit - Terminator knows when you still have processes
Process (computing)
In computing, a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. It contains the program code and its current activity. Depending on the operating system , a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.A computer program is a...

running, and brings up a dialog
Dialog box
In a graphical user interface of computers, a dialog box is a type of window used to enable reciprocal communication or "dialog" between a computer and its user. It may communicate information to the user, prompt the user for a response, or both...

rather than just letting those processes die.
UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

- Terminator does not mangle accented characters, and it copes well with languages such as Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

where there's a mix of normal and wide glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....

s.

Features

See also