Terminator is an open-source

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote term ...

programmed in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

. It is available on Microsoft Windows,

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and other

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

systems that use the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

. Terminator will run on any modern

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inter ...

system running Java 6 or later. Terminator is licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. Terminator was originally written by Phil Norman, who produced a more-or-less usable replacement for

rxvt Rxvt (acronym for our extended virtual terminal) is a terminal emulator for the X Window System, and in the form of a Cygwin port, for Windows. History Rxvt was originally written by Rob Nation and later extensively modified by Mark Olesen, who ...

on his own between 21 April 2004 and 28 May 2004; 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

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

Features

*Automatic Logging - Complete logs are automatically generated of all of the user's terminal sessions. * Drag & Drop -

Text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

and

URLs A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...

, and files from Finder/

Nautilus The nautilus (, ) is a pelagic marine mollusc of the cephalopod family Nautilidae. The nautilus is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and of its smaller but near equal suborder, Nautilina. It comprises six living species in ...

Windows Explorer File Explorer, previously known as Windows 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 for accessing the file ...

can be dropped on Terminator to be inserted as text, with automatic quoting of filenames containing

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

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) in the style of

less Less or LESS may refer to: fewer than,: not as much. Computing * less (Unix), a Unix utility program * Less (stylesheet language), a dynamic stylesheet language * Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), a product development framework that extends Scrum Othe ...

, and offering quick movement to the next or previous match. * Horizontal

Scrolling In computer displays, filmmaking, television production, and other kinetic displays, scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display, vertically or horizontally. "Scrolling," as such, does not change the layout of the text ...

- Most terminal emulators wrap text when it intrudes upon the right margin. Terminator instead provides a horizontal scrollbar when necessary. * Multiple Tabs - Like tabbed

browsing Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. When used about human beings it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing o ...

. * Number Reinterpretation - Terminator will recognize numbers in a variety of bases as the current selection, and add informational menu items to the pop-up menu showing the same number in other bases. No more

man A man is an adult male human. Prior to adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy (a male child or adolescent). Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromo ...

ascii ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

or resorting to bc. * Portability - Written mostly in

, with a small

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

part (for pseudo-terminal support) and a

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...

invocation script, Terminator should compile out of the box on most modern

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

operating systems. * Tab 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 A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be ...

, 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 running, and brings up a

dialog Dialog is an online information service owned by ProQuest, who acquired it from Thomson Reuters in mid-2008. Dialog was one of the predecessors of the World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the Dial ...

rather than just letting those processes die. *

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

- Terminator does not mangle accented characters, and it copes well with languages such as

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

where there's a mix of normal and wide glyphs.

References

External links

Project home page
{{Terminal emulator X Window programs Free terminal emulators

Features

See also

References

External links