Thursday, August 4, 2011

Starting a terminal in GNOME3

After GNOME3 came out, one of the common criticisms I heard/read about was that a click on the the terminal icon doesn't start a new terminal - it brings the current one to the foreground.

I wouldn't have noticed, I can't remember the last time I clicked on that icon. GNOME has for years supported setting a keyboard short-cut to fire up a terminal. GNOME3 still supports that short-cut. Go to System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts, click on "Launch Terminal". Assign a shortcut (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+T). And that's it. Now you can fill your screen faster with new terminals than you could ever click it.

On that note, I recommend using "Terminator" as your terminal emulator, assign shortcuts to "maximize window" and "maximize window horizontally" and with a few shortcuts you essentially have tiling window manager for terminals, inside GNOME.
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10 comments:

  1. JeremyAugust 4, 2011 at 6:20 PM

    What is so terribly foreign about middle-clicking on the icon? Other operating systems have done that for years, and GNOME doesn't deviate from that.

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  2. UnknownAugust 4, 2011 at 6:46 PM

    @Jeremy What is so terribly foreign about clicking it like before? What's the point of breaking stuff?

    Only OS X does that. Everybody else has the sane behavior.

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  3. UnknownAugust 4, 2011 at 7:27 PM

    Funnily enough, I need to find a new shortcut because I always used the "Windows" button for this...

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  4. Andreas NilssonAugust 4, 2011 at 7:37 PM

    There is also ctrl+click to open a new terminal of course.

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  5. Andreas NilssonAugust 4, 2011 at 7:37 PM

    There is also ctrl+click of course.

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  6. JeremyAugust 4, 2011 at 9:38 PM

    @Felipe If I had observed only OS X doing it, I would have specified. I know Windows 7, AWN, and Docky behave that way.

    So that's 5, unless my memory has crapped out. Which (as a disclaimer) is entirely possible.

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  7. AnonymousAugust 5, 2011 at 12:07 AM

    Just to note that Ctrl-Alt-F10 works fine as "Maximize window horizontally" with gnome-terminal. No need to use terminator, seems to me.

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  8. Peter HuttererAugust 5, 2011 at 9:16 AM

    @matej:
    Terminator provides the equivalent of vim split/vsplit for terminals, not anything related to maximising windows. See the screenshots on http://freshmeat.net/projects/gnometerminator

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  9. AnonymousAugust 6, 2011 at 3:59 AM

    I just go into "activity" mode by pressing the super key. Then I just type "ter" and press enter. Seems faster then even using the mouse.

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  10. Derek P. MooreSeptember 17, 2013 at 11:39 AM

    https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/721/gnome-shell-open-terminal/

    ReplyDelete

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