Filed under: OS, Odds and ends
24 hours of Leopard: Tabbed Terminal
Feature: Terminal 2
How it works: What's black and white and tabbed all over? Leopard's Terminal 2 introduces tabbed sessions so you don't need to keep 500 terminal windows open all at once like I do. Hello, my name is Erica and I'm a terminalholic.
Who will use it: Anyone who wants terminal awesomeness in giant barrelfuls. There are 12 steps to bringing your command-line use under control. After admitting that you cannot control your command-line addiction, turning to a tabbed interface will at least help you adjust your coding behavior.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Macroy said 6:05PM on 10-25-2007
Small UI additions like this that turn out to be super-useful are part of the reason why I love Apple.
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maybenot said 6:07PM on 10-25-2007
i love you. you're cute.
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matthew said 6:13PM on 10-25-2007
Do I lose old-school geek cred because I have my terminal windows white on black with a little translucency so I can read text from other terminal or browser windows behind for reference? That demo image reminds me of using Apple II back in the day...don't think I could settle for green on solid black now.
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thethirdmoose said 6:16PM on 10-25-2007
Does this work for X11.app as well?
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Vipul Delwadia said 6:23PM on 10-25-2007
X11 uses it's own terminal app called xterm. If you want a tabbed terminal there are a few available in macports etc, a little googling will get you there ;). Gnome's terminal (gnome-terminal) and KDE's terminal (konsole) are both tabbed so you could grab either of those, but note that there are heavy Gnome or KDE dependencies for either.
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Nathan said 6:25PM on 10-25-2007
iTerm is great, just use that and save $100+
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Athtart said 6:28PM on 10-25-2007
As a long-time 'uber-geek' who considers a terminal window on every device a required "standard" for myself (heck it was the main reason I first hacked my iPhone!) I am looking forward to Tabs!
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janeiro said 6:30PM on 10-25-2007
You can use Terminal.app with X11.
Start X11
Start Terminal (or open a new terminal window)
in Terminal run:
export DISPLAY=:0.0
To test it try running glxgears (you may need to modify your path).
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janeiro said 6:32PM on 10-25-2007
Can you tear off, rearrange, and merge tabs like Safari?
If so, are the new Tear-Off tabs available in Interface Builder? (that would be sweet ;) )
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Dylan said 6:52PM on 10-25-2007
Nice! I didn't know there were tabs available for the terminal now. That right there is a nice little feature that will make my life a bit easier.
Now Apple just needs to add tabs for Finder windows, and I'll be happy forever.
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shelterpaw said 6:55PM on 10-25-2007
Okay.. I use the Terminal now and then. Perhaps 2 or 3 times a week, but I've never really gotten my head around the complete power of the Terminal. How about an article on some slick things you can do. I've used it in combination with AppleScript as an aid in getting music from my gf's iPod and to log into remote servers via SSH etc. It's cool and all, but what and how do you use it as a power tool?
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shelterpaw said 6:56PM on 10-25-2007
@Dylan.. Tabs in the finder would be very nice.
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walkerjs said 7:15PM on 10-25-2007
I use terminal much in the way I use (or used to use, well still do) gnome-terms on Linux. I have a bunch of useful bash scripts I wrote that do things few other apps do, like encode mp3's from .wavs with a darwin ports command line utility, and tag the resultant files by using the name of the file to put it in the right place before importing into iTunes.
Granted, there are utilities out there that do similarly with a GUI, but why bother when you already invented the wheel, and it's all just a command away. I call my tagging script 'ottotag' (actually ottotagv2 since I improved it's function since I first conceived the script.
Don't care for transparency since my background usually makes the text a bit unreadable. I used it for awhile, but I have a green-on-black so I can be nostalgic for the old 3270 days. I usually only have two open at any given time, so tabs aren't that useful to me. I knew about that feature for gnome-terminal, but never used it.
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Arne Martin Aurlien said 7:16PM on 10-25-2007
Tabs in the terminal? Bah, who needs it :-P Screen suits my needs just fine. C-a c ftw!
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phalkunz said 7:22PM on 10-25-2007
Still don't understand why Apple didn't make tabbed Finder in Leopard and other feature that I like to see is writable FTP mount in Finder. That would be sweet if finder had that 2 things.
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Yvo said 7:45PM on 10-25-2007
One word: iTerm
http://iterm.sourceforge.net
It has taken care of this problem, for free, since Panther.
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Doug Alcorn said 7:53PM on 10-25-2007
Here's my Terminal question. Does it support combination modifier keys? What I mean is can you press control-option-x and get a different key sequence sent to the shell than control-x? The easiest way to test this is to run 'emacs' in the terminal and press control-h then k. Then press control-option-b and see what it tells you. You should get "C-M-b runs the command backward-sexp". On Tiger's Terminal you get "M-b runs the command backward-word".
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Steve Dixon said 7:56PM on 10-25-2007
I can't say that I am jumping at this one (I don't use Terminal much) but anything to do with enhancing a UI, especially given the nature of this app's UI and now its Leopard update; things can only get better and more efficient! Go you Terminalholics!
O/T: Considering the UK will have its Leopard Launch Party in its Apple Stores a few hours before those in the US, would you be looking for photos of the events?
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Jan Goh said 8:11PM on 10-25-2007
Screen is BETTER than tabs. Not only can you multiplex your session, you can detach it and reattach it elsewhere. I run a session at all times. When I'm at work, I ssh in and attach my screen session. When I'm at home, I just reattach it to the terminal I'm working on.
You can't tear off a tab over the network.
(Still, this is a pretty nice feature. Multiple tabs and multiple screen sessions, woo.)
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izahn78 said 8:58PM on 10-25-2007
Wow. Not for tabbed terminal (we've had that for awhile with iTerm). The wow is for screen...what a great idea! Screen is awesome.
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