Terminator

Terminator is a terminal emulator for arranging many terminals in one window. It is written in Python on the VTE terminal widget and licensed GPL-2.0-only. Chris Jones started it in 2007 as a roughly 300-line script, and it has been maintained on GitHub by the gnome-terminator team since 2020. It is packaged by most Linux distributions and is also available on FreeBSD. It suits people who are logged into several machines at once or want to watch many shells side by side.

The core workflow is splitting. Ctrl-Shift-O splits horizontally and Ctrl-Shift-E vertically, Ctrl-Shift-N and Ctrl-Shift-P move focus between terminals, Ctrl-Shift-T opens a tab, and Ctrl-Shift-I opens a new window. Each terminal has a title bar that updates as programs set their titles, with a small button that opens the grouping menu. Terminals can be placed in groups, and input can be broadcast to all terminals, only to grouped terminals, or turned off, with the default set by broadcast_default. Keybindings exist for grouping all terminals, the terminals in a window, or the terminals in a tab.

Configuration lives in ~/.config/terminator/config, a human-editable INI-style file handled by the ConfigObj library and documented in man terminator_config. You rarely need to edit it by hand because the Preferences dialog (right-click, Preferences) writes it for you. The file has sections for global settings, keybindings, profiles (fonts, colors, scrollback and so on), saved layouts and plugins. A saved layout can be launched with terminator --layout NAME (-l), and enabled_plugins lists the plugins to load. A running instance uses DBus, which can be turned off with --no-dbus.

Terminator has no GPU acceleration or ligature support. Its strength is layout and broadcasting, not rendering features. It is Linux-focused, and man terminator covers the remaining shortcuts and command-line options.