terminal emulator Archives • Linux Tips

Take A Terminal Screenshot In Terminator

This article is going to apply to those who use the Terminator terminal emulator and want to take a terminal screenshot in Terminator. That means it applies to maybe three of you. You’re welcome.

There are a zillion and three terminal emulators.

Yes, they’re terminal emulators. They, in some form or another, mimic the look and behavior of terminals. Terminals were used on old consoles and were how you interacted with things like mainframes.

Now, you still have terminals available. If you press CTRL + ALT F3 to F6 you should see something called TTY. That stands for Teletypewriter and is from ages past. However, some pedantic people might still call it a terminal emulator or call it a virtual terminal. The latter might be closer to correct.

By the way, if you press CTRL + ALT + F7 it should/might bring you back to your desktop from TTY. If that doesn’t work, hold the LEFT ALT and press the RIGHT ARROW until you cycle back to the desktop.

I don’t want you getting lost and unable to get back to the desktop, after all.

I’ve mentioned Terminator before:

It’s Time To Introduce You To The Terminator!

This is one of my favorite terminal emulators! I use it all the time. Because I have it with a weird theme, I don’t often use it for screenshots. I should because you can take screenshots with a built-in plugin! It’s remarkably simple.

Did I mention that Terminator supports plugins? If I didn’t, well, it does!

If you want, this is a far from complete list of Terminator Plugins.

If you search online, you will find more Terminator plugins that you can use to make your terminal-based computing even easier. What you pick is up to you but one of my favorites is one that you don’t even have to work for. It’s something that should be available by default in all Terminator installs. If it’s not available, your distro chose to package Terminator without plugins.

Terminator:

The name is as awesome as it implies and it will likely be available in any distro you choose to run as your daily driver. If you check the man page, you’ll see this:

Terminator – Multiple GNOME terminals in one window

That’s just the start of it. Also, while it’s ‘for’ GNOME doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work just fine with other desktop environments. It suits them just fine and I’ve yet to find a desktop environment that doesn’t allow me to use Terminator.

It’s a multi-windowed (if you want, and I do not) terminal with a ton of options. More importantly, for the sake of this article, it also supports plugins.

One of those plugins lets me take screenshots that look like this:

terminator screenshot — This was taken without any additional software. It’s just Terminator doing Terminator things.

So, how is this done? What is this witchcraft?

Take A Terminal Screenshot In Terminator:

Terminator is a terminal-based application. It is a terminal emulator, after all. So, it’s going to require a terminal. You can install Terminator with your GUI package manager or you can install it via the terminal. You know what we’ll be doing, so press CTRL + ALT + T, and let’s get started.

I’m going to assume that you’re not like me and that you don’t have Terminator already installed. So, pick the right command for your package manager so that you can install Terminator.

Keep in mind that these commands are from my notes. They might be old or outdated. Be sure to verify them and let me know if I made any mistakes!

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

sudo apt install terminator

1	sudo apt install terminator

Fedora/etc:

sudo dnf install terminator

1	sudo dnf install terminator

RHEL/CentOS:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install terminator

1 2	sudo yum install epel-release sudo yum install terminator

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

sudo pacman -S terminator

1	sudo pacman -S terminator

One of those commands should work for you. If you use a different package manager, you’ll likely find that Terminator is an option. It’s a pretty popular terminal.

Now that you have Terminator installed, you can set it as the default (if you want) or you can open it from your application menu.

With Terminator now open, right-click within the terminal menu and click on the Preferences option to continue…

Now, click on Plugins and enable “TerminalShot”, which looks like this:

Enable plugins in Terminator via the prefefrences. — This should be fairly easy to explain and I have faith that my readers will understand it.

With that enabled, you just close the preferences window.

From there, you have this as an option when you right-click on the window:

Take screenshots within Terminator. — That’s about it, now you can save the device as a .png or a .jpg file, picking your directory first.

You’ll then be faced with a screen that looks like this:

Save the screenshot from Terminator. — If this one needs me to describe it, you probably shouldn’t be following this article…

That’s pretty obvious. What might not be obvious is that it seems to work for both .png and .jpg file formats. I’ve had good luck with both and both seem to open appropriately. I seldom use these screenshots for this site, but I have and the reason I don’t is because the color just doesn’t look good with the site’s theme. Sometimes it stands out but other times it just looks murky.

Anyhow, that’s how to take a terminal screenshot in Terminator… Pretty sweet!

Closure:

You know… I don’t know how many people are going to want to take a terminal screenshot in Terminator. I forgot to take my sleepy meds and this is the middle of the night. I’ve also been sipping away at my glass of blueberry wine. It seemed like a perfectly good article.

I was watching YouTube videos and I thought about how I do this fairly often and decided that I’d turn it into an article. There were no dissenting opinions offered, so it was turned into an article. Fortunately, I use software that makes it look like I can type coherent words! (Nah, I can do that no matter what! Plus, I’m relatively sober, just tired.)

So, if you’ve ever used Terminator, look into the various plugins available. It extends the application even more and there are some useful things in there. Terminator is one of the best terminal emulators on the planet and I’d consider dying on this hill. It’s really that good.

If you don’t agree, leave a comment. I won’t change my mind, but I will publish it. You’re welcome.

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Clear The Terminal

Today’s article will be a nice and easy article, where we learn how to clear the terminal. That is, we will clear any typed text and returned information from the terminal. This will be a nice and quick article.

I am feeling like garbage today and I still need to edit the last article. Ugh… But, the show must go on!

This is what I get for not having scheduled a few articles ahead. Fortunately, I have short articles in mind. Today is a good day for just that.

It should be noted that clearing the screen doesn’t delete your scrollback history. Someone could come along and use the up arrow to see your previously typed commands. If you’re at your workstation then I guess you could consider this a privacy measure – but it certainly shouldn’t be considered much of a security measure.

So, as I said, it’ll be a short article. Let’s just jump into it…

Clear The Terminal:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Now, let’s generate some content… Run the following:

ls && uptime

1	ls && uptime

That should fill up your terminal with stuff. Now, let’s clear the terminal. Type the following command:

clear

clear

Tada!

But wait, there’s more!

Run those commands again. This time, and this appears to be pretty universal, just use your keyboard and press CTRL + L.

See? It does the same thing as you get when you type clear. Those are two ways for you to use when you want to clear the terminal.

Closure:

Yup… You’ve learned how to clear the terminal. I told you that it’d be a short article. It’s even an easy article. Now I’m going to lie down and hope for a nap.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Pause And Unpause Your Terminal

Today, we’re going to learn how to pause and unpause your terminal. This will be one of the easiest articles I’ve ever written. It may also be one of the shortest! So, to learn how to pause and unpause your terminal, read on!

In fact, this information is so brief, I’m not quite sure how to turn it into a ‘full-fledged’ article. There’s really not all that much to it, but it’s information that should probably be on the site somewhere, and that somewhere might as well be here.

For many of us, we’ve learned that pressing CTRL + S will save whatever it is we’re working on. Well, that’s not the behavior you’ll see in the terminal – and from my testing, this appears pretty universal.

If you press CTRL + S while in the terminal, which a new person may do by accident, it pauses the screen – making the screen appear as though it is locked. This can be confusing, especially to a new Linux user that’s not accustomed to using the terminal.

There’s no obvious way to unlock the screen. There’s no tooltip or anything like that involved, so a new person may just end up closing their terminal and opening a new one. You don’t have to close the terminal and start a new one.

Well, you can press CTRL + Q and that will unlock the screen. That’s really all there is to it – but there’s a caveat.

Pause And Unpause Your Terminal – CAVEAT:

Anything typed on the screen, any inputs entered in that terminal, will appear (and function) when you unpause the screen. This could be risky if someone has had access to the computer while you were away. Pausing the terminal in no way should be considered a security measure.

For example, press CTRL + S in an open terminal. Then type the following:

uptime

uptime

Next, press the ENTER button.

Finally, press CTRL + Q.

When you press that key combination, you’ll see that the ‘uptime’ command is going to be, and will be, executed. So, this isn’t even anything remotely secure. It’s useful for pausing when there’s a lot of information being fed to the terminal, and that’s about it.

As far as I can tell, it’s more likely to be used by accident, tripping up new Linux users who may have hit the keys by accident or hit them thinking they’re saving something.

Closure:

Well, that’s about as long as I can make this article without padding it for Google’s sake. It really doesn’t need to be longer than this to show you how to pause and unpause your terminal. It’s really just a simple matter to unpause the terminal without needing to open a new instance.

It’s Time To Introduce You To The Terminator!

Today’s article is about one of my favorite terminal emulators, Terminator. Terminator is one of my favorite terminal emulators, and I’d like to use this opportunity to expose more users to it. For lack of a better category, we’ll say this is a review. Why not? It’s my site, I’ll call it a review if I wanna! I’ll make it a review!

So, we call it a terminal emulator because it emulates the terminals of old, back when terminals were the main way for a person to interface with their computer. They are not true terminals, but they perform similar functions. Long gone are the days of just green-screens. Today, we have graphical user environments and there’s less focus on the terminal for some folks. From here on out, I’ll just be calling it ‘terminal’ for simplicity and brevity sake.

There are some die-hard folks who still cling to the terminal – and I’m one of them, at least for certain tasks. At any given moment, I have at least two terminal instances open, each a different piece of software. One of those is usually Xfce4 and the other is often Terminator. Today’s article is about the latter.

Chances are good that you can install Terminator with ease. It’s likely in your default repositories. For example, on Ubuntu you’d install it with this command:

sudo apt install terminator

1	sudo apt install terminator

Go ahead, give it a shot… If not immediately available, you can look here for more information. If you’re really energetic, you can read the documentation. In this case, it’s going to be a positive review (obviously), so I’d not recommend it (such as I am) if I wasn’t a fan… So…

Why Terminator:

You’ll not be even remotely surprised when you open Terminator for the first time, and that’s a good thing. You’ll see your standard terminal looking thing, complete with a title bar. Truthfully, it’s kinda ugly looking until you make it your own (more on that in a minute). It looks like this:

terminator terminal emulator in its naked form — Terminal (terminal emulator) without any customizations.

What you’re looking for is in the right mouse-button click – the preferences menu. Once you open that, you’ll see all sorts of options.

Once in the options, you’ll start to understand why I like Terminator. You can make it visually appealing, use multiple tabs, group tabs, auto-run commands when opened, and have all the various profiles you could possibly want. If you’re working on multiple servers at the same time, this is definitely a great help.

You have infinite theme options, but there are a number of them that are built in – the standard types like solarized dark or light. If I’m not taking screenshots, I like mine to look like this:

terminator with a thene — As I’m often in a dark room, this is excellent for my eyes.

That is so much nicer on my eyes. And, if the Terminator theme didn’t clue you in, yes I am using a computer that I don’t normally use. It’s a long story, but nothing is broken beyond my ‘net connection. But, that’s why the screenshots look different. I am also using Flameshot instead of my beloved Shutter.

So, that’s not enough? Seriously – go through and check the preferences. You have global options and then you have all sorts of preferences that you can pick – each contained in their own distinct profiles. When you get to the profiles, you’ll see how much customization is really possible. Allow me to show you:

terminator has options - lots of them — As you can see, there are a whole lot of options with Terminator.

What does Terminator offer? A whole lot… Not only are there tabs, you can set it up in a more traditional grid fashion. These layouts can be moved with drag-and-drop. The list of keyboard shortcuts is extensive – and you can probable tell I’m just reciting the documentation. Layouts are even saved from session to session.

But Wait, there’s more!

Anyhow, all those preferences, not just layouts, can be saved from session to session. Once you get it configured the way you want, it’ll let you retain those settings. Many of these are all extensions of the profiles feature, so it’s highly customized if you want it to be.

I especially like the individual profiles – not seen on this computer’s screenshot. If I paid a bit more attention, I could just copy the config from ~/.config/terminator, but I’m slacking and this situation is temporary. (I’m amazed that I’ve still been able to keep up my publication schedule!) I did not, so you get a different set of screenshots.

If you want, you can even find plugins for Terminator. You can write your own, if such is your desire. If you click here, you’ll see a bunch of plugins that you can use to extend Terminator even further. (Quite a few plugins exist, so do check the link.)

Note: I also wrote an article explaining how to change your default terminal.

As I said, there are quite a few plugins and some of them are quite useful – especially for system admins and programmers, or DevOps folks I guess. They’re universally free, in every sense of the word. They’re also easy to install – just drop them into ~/.config/terminator/plugins/ and they’ll be available to enable from the preferences menu.

If nothing else, go ahead and install Terminator to see if you like it. I dare say that you won’t be disappointed, unless you’ve got some weird edge-case and even then it’s about the best you’re going to get.

Rating Terminator:

Terminator does everything you can want in a terminal, more or less. If it doesn’t do what you want, plugins are easily developed and someone else may have scratched that itch for you already.

I honestly can’t think of anything it’s missing that I personally need or want. It can be a bit boxy and the look is dated, but it should match your theme fairly well, or better if you do some work customizing it.

I appreciate how easy it is to configure it to work with my eyesight. I’m partially colorblind (not the way you’re probably thinking) and have difficulties with the spaces between the primary colors. I can see green, but yellow-green may appear as either yellow or green to me. So, some of the themes (again, you can customize them as much as you desire) are wonderful for my eyes.

Yeah, try as I might, I just can’t think of anything bad to say about it. I’m reluctant to give anything a 10/10, but this is really close to being the perfect application for the task it is designed for. I’d even go so far as saying that it’s feature-complete, but some folks must not agree ’cause they keep writing plugins and that means they want more features.

So, I’m going to give this a 9.5 out of 10. That’s the highest I’ve ever rated anything on this site and I’d not expect to see that score for anything else. I knock the 0.5 because obviously people expect more from it – options they feel should be defaults. A few of the plugins are indeed handy (even to me, a simplistic user). Yeah, I’ll knock off the points for that. That sounds good. It gets a 9.5/10. That’s pretty much a gold medal winner, right there!

Closure:

And there you have it… You have another article – this one a review, and a review of not just one of my favorite pieces of software but of a piece of software I use many, many times a day. Even if you have a favorite terminal, give Terminator a try. You won’t be disappointed – probably… If you are, you’re just weird!

Today, We Have Fun In The Linux Terminal

Today, we will learn nothing of value – except how to have fun in the Linux terminal. You know what they say, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So, today we’ll be doing some playing.

Why? Well, because it’s fun. There are a number of fun things you can do in the Linux terminal, but this article is only going to cover a few of them. All of these are harmless, some perhaps even fun to share with a co-worker (perhaps even mischievously) and some just to make you smile.

For the sake of brevity, I’m just going to write this from the perspective of an Ubuntu user. You should be able to find equivalents for most every major distro, but that’s up to you. I mean, it’ll work in Debian and Mint etc, but you’ll have to hunt for yourself to find them in Arch, Fedora, or Gentoo!

So, without further ado…

Fun In The Linux Terminal:

Once you have your terminal open, let’s visit the Matrix!

cmatrix:

Start this off by installing ‘cmatrix’ with this command:

sudo apt install cmatrix

1	sudo apt install cmatrix

Next, in your terminal, type ‘cmatrix‘ and watch the screen. It’ll look something like this as the text flows by:

cmatrix in action — With the new Matrix coming out… Feel free to run this when nosy people look over your shoulder!

See the man page for more detailed usage. Or not… It’s just for fun!

sl (Steam Locomotive):

This one is for those times when you fat-finger ‘ls’ and type ‘sl’ by mistake. My screenshot abilities were lacking with this one. So, you’ll have to make do.

To install ‘sl’, just do this:

sudo apt install sl

1	sudo apt install sl

The next time you mistype ‘ls’ you’ll see what it does. Of course you can just type ‘sl’ and not wait for it. If you do so, be prepared for a steam locomotive that looks a little like this:

sl in action — Choo choo!!! It makes a more complete train, I just suck with graphics.

That’s sure to brighten a day such as the one where you’d be mistyping ‘ls’. Who doesn’t like trains?!? Sad people. Sad people don’t like trains.

Toilet:

You’ll find that toilet is a free version of figlet, a tool for making text larger for things like banner printing. I don’t think too many people have printed banners since the end of the dot matrix era, but it’s fun to play around with in the terminal.

To install toilet, and its wonderfully juvenile name, you just use:

sudo apt install toilet

1	sudo apt install toilet

There are a number of advanced features, but you can just type ‘toilet <text>’ and press the enter button. For example, there’s this output:

toilet in action - showing large text — There you have it, a giant KGIII! Just what you wanted for your birthday!

Again, go through the man page for more options – like the ability to choose a font and size. Have fun with it!

Closure:

See? Just like I promised, you’ve learned nothing of value. You can use ‘sl’ on a co-worker, frighten people on a train with cmatrix, or make large ASCII text in the terminal to amuse yourself. Yup, nothing of value! You’re welcome!