Bernd Marienfeldt

Have you ever looked for a tool to keep track of your terminal sessions by not loosing conspectus under Linux. Split Screens can help to perceive a much quicker and simultaneous record of what’s going on by contrast with terminal tabs.

Well first there is the built in terminal under Ubuntu, depending on whether using KDE or Gnome you either end up with “Konsole” or  ”Gnome-Terminal , which both refuse a split screen like they would be afflicted with a disease by offering such handy feature.

Then there is the option to fire up a Gnu Screen session inside your terminal application which can be very useful to leave a session running in the “background” with closing the terminal or even loosing connectivity. However I felt the split screen feature is a bit stale bread.

Then I found this Multi Gnome Terminal application which won’t compile unless you drag immemorial libraries into your system which I really didn’t prefer either.

Finally a working solution for me:

The Terminator application paves itself on top of your existing Gnome-Terminal and allows split-screens easily. Terminator is available in the Ubuntu repository and can be installed “apt-get install terminator”.

Right mouse button drops you a menu for splitting terminals horizontally or vertically as many you like or if you prefer quick shortcuts it can assist this way just as well :

Ctrl-Shift-E: will split the view vertically.
Ctrl-Shift-O: will split the view horizontally.
Ctrl-Shift-P: will focus be active on the previous view.
Ctrl-Shift-N: will focus be active on the next view.
Ctrl-Shift-W: will close the view where the focus is on.
Ctrl-Shift-Q: will exit terminator.

F11: will make terminator go fullscreen.