Ubuntu terminals

Terminals

Although the terminal commands may seem somewhat puzzling at first, you'll soon find out that the terminal is a nifty tool and allows for faster and more powerful access to all of Ubuntu's possibilities than the graphical interface and mouse. If you don't know your way around the terminal, have a look at this page.

Terminator

You will soon find out that you will have to work in multiple terminals in parallel. A convenient tool to avoid having a large amount of terminals is Terminator, so you can have multiple terminals in one window. You can install it via the Ubuntu software center. To make Terminator start up with some screen setup:

• 1. Open “Terminator”
• 2. Make the set-up to be saved: some split ups
  • a. Right click
  • b. Choose “split horizontally” or “split vertically”
  • c. Continue the previous step, until you are happy
• 3. Right click
• 4. Choose “preferences”
• 5. Pick tab “layout”
• 6. Click "add"
• 7. Enter a name (= <your chosen name>)
• 8. Press "enter"
• 9. Click "close"
• 10. Right click the button to open “Terminator”
• 11. Choose “properties”
• 12. Enter in “command” : “terminator -l <your chosen name>”
• 13. Click close
• 14. To test: open “Terminator”

bashrc

Each time you start a terminal, a script with the name .bashrc is started. In order to avoid having to set some variables manually every time you open a terminal you can add it to this script. If you add something to the script, you must restart the terminal, otherwise the changes are not made in the current terminal.

The bashrc script is located in your home folder. To open the bashrc script using gedit, you can therefore type:

gedit ~/.bashrc

Obviously you can use any other editor if you like.