multi-gnome-terminal [-?|--help] [--version] [--usage] [--disable-sound] [--enable-sound] [--espeaker=HOSTNAME:PORT] [--gdk-debug=FLAGS] [--gdk-no-debug=FLAGS] [--display=DISPLAY] [--sync] [--no-xshm] [--name=NAME] [--class=WM_CLASS] [--gxid_host=HOST] [--gxid_port=PORT] [--xim-preedit=STYLE] [--xim-status=STYLE] [--gtk-debug=FLAGS] [--gtk-no-debug=FLAGS] [--g-fatal-warnings] [--gtk-module=MODULE] [--disable-crash-dialog] [--sm-client-id=ID] [--sm-config-prefix=PREFIX] [--sm-disable] [--font=FONT] [--nologin] [--login] [--geometry=GEOMETRY] [-e=COMMAND |--command=COMMAND|--execute =COMMAND] [--foreground=COLOR] [--background=COLOR] [--solid] [--pixmap=FILENAME] [--shaded] [--noshaded] [--transparent] [--utmp] [--noutmp] [--wtmp] [--nowtmp] [--lastlog] [--nolastlog] [-t TITLE|--title TITLE] [--icon=ICONNAME] [--termname NAME] [--start-factory-server] [--use-factory] [-s, --tclass=TABCLASS_NAME] [-S, --wclass=WINCLASS_NAME] [-w, --add-window] [-W, --add-window-wt] [-T, --add-tab] [-h, --hsplit] [-v, --vsplit] [-p, --tpath PATH] [-c, --tcommand COMMAND] [-x COMMAND] [-n, --tname NAME] [-N, --tnext] [-P, --tprev] [-A, --newapp] [--nowait]
multi-gnome-terminal is a terminal emulator program that is based on gnome-terminal, from the GNOME project. multi-gnome-terminal emulates the DEC VT terminals and provides access to the Unix shell environment.
multi-gnome-terminal supports color display, pseudo-transparency with shading and tinting, pixmap backgrounds, and offers various enhancements over gnome-terminal.
The most notable enhancement of multi-gnome-terminal over the orginal gnome-terminal program is the ability to run multiple terminals simultaneously within the same window. And even to split the terminal window horizontally, and vertically. Terminals may be "bonded" to each, and may be moved with the mouse from one window to another. Switching between active terminals is easily done with either the mouse or with keyboard shortcuts. Other significant enhancements include a toolbar, a buttonbar, user definable key bindings, font shadowing, improved Classes (profiles), and the ability to add user definable commands to initialize new terminals that can be accessed through the multi-gnome-terminal GUI.
multi-gnome-terminal is designed to emulate the "xterm" program provided by the X Consortium. The xterm(1) program in turn is an almost-complete emulation of the DEC VT102 terminal.
multi-gnome-terminal supports the same extensions to the VT102 that the xterm(1) program provides, through special escape sequences. The xterm(1) program is an evolving program. Recent changes to xterm(1) have been been incorporated into multi-gnome-terminal. This includes emulation of the newer DEC VT220 escape sequences, and also VT52.
Some of the more commonly used command line options:
multi-gnome-terminal --command minicomor for example, if you want to monitor your system:
multi-gnome-terminal --command top
See the GNOME and GDK documentation for the other options. The User's Guide has examples of command line usage.
Each multi-gnome-terminal is like many terminals in one. Multiple terminal instances can run simultaneously within one window. Each runs its own, unique shell environment. New terminals are started by selecting "New Term" from either the menubar, buttonbar, or toolbar. This will start a new shell, and create a new "Tab" (or split Tab) that allows easy access between the various opened terminals. Custom commands to launch a new Tab can be defined from the "Edit Commands" selection of the Settings menu.
In addition, individual Tabs are customizable and allow the user to choose label names and colors. The Tab label will show on both the Tab itself, and the Window title bar. Colors are used to notify the user of events in a non-focused terminal. By default, the Tab label will show red if there is activity in a non-focused terminal, and then change to blue to notify that this activity has completed. See "Colors" under the Preferences menu selection. Tabs can also be saved with their PATH information.
To create new terminals:
- buttons on bottom of the window (buttonbar)
- popup menu (right clicking on the terminal)
- menubar
- keyboard shortcuts (using letter "L"):
CTRL-l r: Start a root shell (via su)
CTRL-l n: Start a bash shell
CTRL-l m: Start Midnight Commander in a new shell
To switch between running terminals:
- keyboard shortcuts:
SHIFT-Right: next terminal
SHIFT-Left: previous terminal
CTRL-<n>: switch to n-th terminal
- buttons on the buttonbar
- buttons on the toolbar
- clicking on notebook Tabs (bookmarks)
- using notebook popup menu (right click on tabs)
To change the title of a terminal (tab label and Window title text):
- buttons on the bottom of the screen (buttonbar)
- buttons in the toolbar
- menubar (File)
- keyboard shortcut: CTRL-F2
The above shortcuts may be re-defined under Keybindings from the Settings menu.
multi-gnome-terminal allows for different configuration profiles to suit different uses (e.g. different background colors, fonts, presence, absence or position of scrollbars, fonts, and so on). These are known as "Classes". There are two distinct Class types: Window (wclass) and Tab (tclass). To configure these, invoke either the Tab Preferences or Win Preferences dialog boxes from the Settings menu of multi-gnome-terminal. This can be reached either through the menubar, or the pop-up menu accessed by shift-right-clicking on the terminal window. Select the options you prefer (these changes will be made to your currently open terminal, so you can see what they look like). Before closing the Preferences pop-up, make sure you have put a new name in the space marked "Terminal Class" if you want to create a new Class. Click the "Apply" button to save changes.
Classes can be specified for an entire Window, or on a per Tab basis (all terminals within that Tab). However, the configuration options that belong to each Class are mutually exclusive. For instance, a background color is an attribute of the Tab Class. The same is true for fonts, font colors, and many other user preferences that may be configured.
To activate a specific class at program startup, use the --tclass=TAB_CLASS (Tab specific Class) or --wclass=WIN_CLASS (Window Class) command line options. The current Class can also be dynamically changed from the Settings menu. Each Window Class may have its own unique start-up Tabs, which are defined in Edit Commands of the Settings menu. Classes can be created or removed using the appropriate Preferences selection from the Settings menu.
It is possible to start a single instance of multi-gnome-terminal, and yet have multiple windows open at the same time. The easiest way of achieving this is by selecting "File" and then "New Window" from the menu. But it is also possible to programatically instruct multi-gnome-terminal to re-use an existing running instance of multi-gnome-terminal.
By default the GNOME desktop ships with settings that allow terminals to share a single process, and thus reduce memory usage. This is achieved by registering GNOME with the CORBA gnome-name-service and using the --start-factory and the --use-factory options.
Like gnome-terminal, multi-gnome-terminal can display a pixmap background, or display in pseudo-transparency mode where the root window background is visible through the terminal window. Also, multi-gnome-terminal adds the ability to shade and tint the window. This requires transparency to be on and is configured from the "Image" tab of the Preferences dialog.
Commands to create new terminals and Tabs can also be defined. The included built-in defaults are shell (user's default shell), root (root shell via su), mc (Midnight Commander), Split (create a split in the current terminal from another terminal), View (create a new terminal in "view" mode from another terminal), New tab with... (create a new Tab with another terminal). The user can add his own startup shell commands, including setting the PATH through the "Edit Commands" selection from the Settings menu in the menubar. Each command should launch a shell, and will thus open a new tabbed terminal window in the process. The command should either invoke an interactive shell (e.g. bash), or run a command (e.g. a script) that does not exit immediately (and thus would close the Tab/terminal). Commands will appear on the appropriate menus and are easily launched with the mouse or keyboard shortcuts.
The built-in default Commands that appear at the top of the New Term menu (e.g. mc), may be disabled in the New Term Tab (the third Tab).
Commands to initiliaze new Tabs automatically on start-up should be defined in the Startup Tabs Tab of the Edit Commands dialog, and the "Don't Open Startup Tabs" should be unchecked for this feature. Use the "Get" button to copy a selected item from the New Term Menu Tab. Start-up Commands are Class dependent, so each Class may have a unique start-up configuration. Both a Win Class and a Tab class may be specified for start-up Tabs.
Commands may be "grouped" into sub-menus for better organization. Example: adding entries with names of "Projects/School" and "Projects/Sourceforge" would create a sub-menu entry labeled "Projects". The sub-menu would contain two command entries: "School" and "Sourceforge".
User defined "Commands" are also available as Keybindings. See the "Command->New Tab" Keybinding Action.
Multi-gnome-terminal now supports font shadowing, which is a technique for outlining fonts with a thin shadow effect. This helps with contrast and readability on transparent or pixmapped backgrounds. This is enabled from the "Image" tab of the Preferences dialog.
Key bindings used by multi-gnome-terminal may be customized by selecting "Key Bindings" from the Settings menu in the menubar. Various tasks, such as opening a new terminal or switching between active terminals, may be assigned to keyboard combinations of the user's choosing. Key bindings can also be used to force unco-operative keys to behave as desired via the 'Escape Sequences' feature. Or to define keyboard macros so that keyboard events can execute arbitrary commands.
The terminal window can be split, either horizontally or vertically through the New Term sub-menu selections. The window is split in half, but may be resized. There are also command line options for splitting. Split terminals can be moved from one Window to another, or to their own, new Tab.
Terminals may also be "bonded", which allows the output from a command in one terminal to be echoed to all "bonded" terminals. See "All bonded" from the File menu.
"Viewing" is similar to "bonding", but only the output from the source terminal is displayed. To View the output from one terminal, in the terminal of another window, select "View" from the New Term menu. Then click the target window in which the output is to be viewed.
Terminals can be moved from one multi-gnome-terminal window to another, as long as both windows share the same process (either opened via the "New Window" option or via the Gnome-terminal factory command line option). Select "Split" or "New Tab" from the New Term menu of the target window, then click the terminal in the window to be moved to the target window.
Environment Variables used By multi-gnome-terminal:
In addition, mgt-helper, a Bash script, is included to help Multi-gnome-terminal integrate better with the shell environment. See mgt-helper(1), or the User Guide.
/usr/bin/multi-gnome-terminal /usr/sbin/mgt-pty-helper /usr/bin/mgt-helper
Multi-gnome-terminal is designed to integrate fully with a GNOME session and environment. But it can be used even in the absence of a gnome-session as long as the required GNOME and GTK libs are installed.
Cristiano De Michele is the creator and author of multi-gnome-terminal. Guillermo Ontanon and Soeren Sonnenberg have also contributed to developement of multi-gnome-terminal.
Multi-gnome-terminal is partially based on the original work of Michael Zucchi, Miguel de Icaza, Erik Troan and others.
mgt-helper(1), gnome-session(1), gnome-terminal(1), xterm(1)
The User's Guide has a much more complete explanation of Multi-gnome-terminal's features and usage.
Please use the tracking system at http://multignometerm.sourceforge.net to report bugs, request features, etc.
Bug Reports:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=411232&group_id=34480&func=browse
Feature Requests:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=411235&group_id=34480&func=browse
Patches:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=411234&group_id=34480&func=browse
Mailing Lists:
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=34480
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 Cristiano De Michele
Multi-gnome-terminal is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, which is available from the Free Software Foundation, Inc, 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.