Hey everyone!

A lot of people around me know that I have become somewhat of a big fan of Linux of late. My main distro for my home PC is Kubuntu. There are quite a few good reasons why I think Kubuntu is one of the top Linux PC distros. However if you are interested check out this post to find out more about Kubuntu.

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kubuntu-focal.html

Anyway whatever Linux distro is your flavour that’s cool, and the great thing about Linux – choose what you want and make it what you want!

Anyway I really just wanted to share a something I found last night – Terminator… Not the movie of course but a console/terminal emulator.

https://gnometerminator.blogspot.com/p/introduction.html

Find out more about Terminator here!

I was really impressed by a particular theme for terminal that I saw. But another great thing I found was how finally there was syntax highlighting. I use VSCode a lot and as a newbie when it comes to Ansible and Python, it is great when there is syntax highlighting.

Fast forward about 1 hour and another glass of bourbon later and I had modified my Terminator terminal to suit what I liked. This is what a simple navigation to a GIT repo on my PC looks like as an example.

Now getting to this point was a little bit of playing around and finding what I liked but it wasn’t too hard. Of course with all things in the open source community there are many great people out there who provide helpful guides. Instead of re-writing everything I did you can follow his well written guide if you are interested. It will take about 15mins to get through it and then the rest is you fine tuning it to what you like.

https://maxim-danilov.github.io/make-linux-terminal-great-again/

Make Linux Terminal Great Again

After you have finished reading that guide, there is one thing I really recommend doing and that is changing your default window size when it opens. I found that the ability to change this wasn’t so helpful and because I have a 4k screen I like to utilize some of the real estate available to me…

In order to do this you need to modify the Terminator config file.

editor $HOME/.config/terminator/config

When you edit this file it will looks something like this.

From here just one line needs to be added in that will launch the terminator window with a size that you prefer.

I have chosen 1600, 1440 by adding the following line under the [layouts] [[default]] [[[window0]]] configuration block.

size = 1600, 1440	

Now my configuration under layouts looks like this.

So yeah happy bashing away in a new and improved terminal! Also Terminator is not the only terminal emulator out there. Here is a short list of highly rated emulators.

https://opensource.com/life/17/10/top-terminal-emulators

Have an opinion about a terminal emulator that you have used or a particular theme you want to share? Please share below in the comments!