non kde/gnome tabbed consoles [LWN.net]

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Posted Jun 5, 2004 0:55 UTC (Sat) by PhracturedBlue (subscriber, #4193)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

I have been using konsole for a long time on my (ancient) laptop, and it is great. the two features I use the most are (a) tabs, and (b) changing the background image of a given tab. Since konsole remembers its settings on shutdown/startup, this means I always get a konsole with 4 tabs, two of which have a different background than the others. I use these to ssh into other servers, and I can tell at a glance which tab I am on (while the titlebar also tells me this, I have a tendancy not to look at it very often, and have found myself to paste or type into the wrong tab often).

Well, recently, I gave up KDE in favor of a XFCE, and wanted to remove KDE and all of it's dependencies from my limited HD. Also, Konsole requires arts which causes problems on my aging laptop (which has suffered a partial audio hardware failure).

So I've tried to find a term that has (a) tabs, and (b) different backgrounds (even a solid color would do) for different tabs, and guess what. There are none. The closest I've gotten is eterm and 'screen'. This gives me my tabs, but not different backgrounds, and screen has its own limitations.

The other options would appear to be fluxbox, which uses the WM to do tabbing and would let me set up an environment I'd like, but I just can't seem to make fluxbox give me an environment I like.

I've tried gnome-terminal and powershell (which have slightly fewer dependencies), but couldn't get it to either to give me different backgrounds per tab, and overall just found them a bit cumersome to use.

So while I agree that there are great terminals out there, trying to find ones with advanced features with minimal dependencies is not easy.

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non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Posted Jun 5, 2004 12:52 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

Tabbing should indeed be done by the WM: you can't know in advance what tabs should be grouped. I have yet to see a program that supports tabbing that allows me to move tabs from one window to another, besides galeon (and emacs, though it is not exactly "tabs" there).

Eventually I decided not to use fluxwm, because of non-relevant reasons (More about that in a future Grumpy Editor's article about WMs ;-) )

One problem with grouping xterms is that you can't resize just one: you have to resize the all together. If one of the windows runs less or whatever, the underlying shell will not be notified of the resize and will behave strangely .

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Posted Jun 6, 2004 1:17 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I've gotten so used to dragging tabs in my web browser and IRC client that I often try to drag a tab from a Galeon window to an XChat window before I realize what I'm doing. And, frankly, I don't see any reason why I shouldn't be able to do that!

Something for Gnome 4 or KDE 5 I suppose. :)

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Posted Jun 6, 2004 3:07 UTC (Sun) by PhracturedBlue (subscriber, #4193) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, to follow up to my own post, I just discovered multi-aterm or materm here

It isn't really maintained and is kinda buggy, but it has both tabs and background images. Unfortunately it isn't under much development, and background images don't actually work (transparencies do though), and you can't specify different backgrounds for differnt tabs, but it is based off aterm, and the tab code doesn't look that complex, so with a little hacking hopefully it can be made to serve my purposes.

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Posted Nov 20, 2004 2:33 UTC (Sat) by terminator (guest, #2292) [Link]

mrxvt, a successor of multi-aterm based on rxvt/aterm/eterm has been released for a while under active development. lots of features have been added, and it is pretty stable for daily use.

non kde/gnome tabbed consoles

Posted Jun 18, 2004 2:27 UTC (Fri) by scottie (guest, #22406) [Link]

FVWM has FvwmTabs which is a generic tabbing module.