Terminator vs Xfce4 terminal

It is possible to split the terminal window into several areas and you can re-size them as needed. Multiple windows and tabs are also supported.

You can change the size, color, and give different shapes to the terminal. You can also save multiple layouts and profiles via the GUI preferences editor.

You can type at the same time on any number of arbitrarily grouped terminals. (Or all at once, or only the focussed, all switchable with a shortcut or menu item).

Terminator functionality can be extended via plugins. Examples of this include:

• Custom commands
• URL handlers (on top of common ones) for apt, launchpad, maven
• Logging output to file

Terminator allows the user to save, configure, and launch arrangements of windows, tabs, and terminals.

The scrollback lines can be set to a preferred value, or set to infinite scrollback.

If you want to use Terminator as a drop-down terminal, you can do so by editing the config file and set whichever key you want to use as a trigger.

Many actions in Terminator can be triggered with configurable shortcuts.

If you have a compositor, you can use true transparency. You can also have a fake transparency where an image can be used as a fake desktop. Both of these can be tinted with the background color too.

There is a standard notification pop-up that appears if a terminal is silent for a configurable period, or if it has new activity.

When not constrained by it's own general principles and unique features, Terminator tries to follow the GNOME-Terminal way of doing things.

You can zoom (font size increases) or maximize (font size does not increase) a single terminal to fill the whole window with a shortcut. All the other terminals remain open, they are just hidden from sight, and everything is restored by repeating the shortcut.

Every single aspect of Terminator is exhaustively documented, and can be quickly opened with the common shortcut F1 (which is configurable, of course).

Terminator has tabs, drag and drop re-ordering of terminals, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to help the user. It also has an extensive preferences window, or if you have to, a plain text config file.

Unless this option is disabled (it's enabled by default), Terminator will only run the first instance as a process. And when it's run again, the DBus server will simply open a new window using the old process. This helps a lot with reducing resource usage.

Terminator has a really helpful functionality that lets the user start/stop a logger in order to save the text written in the shell into a file. In order to do this, the user needs to turn on the logging plugin in the plugin settings, and then a "start logger" menu item will appear in a right click menu when using the terminal. The user is also able to pick the path they would like the logs saved to when turning the plugin on.

If you have long lines of text inside a terminal and then you change the size of the terminal, the text will also automatically update according to the new size.

Some activities can be scripted using a tool called remotinator which uses the DBus interface to command the application to perform a limited set of tasks.

Like other applications included in the Xfce package, this terminal emulator is very lightweight and doesn't require many resources to run. This makes it perfect for systems that have low specs.

You can set the transparency of the Xfce4 terminal on any amount you want, out of the box.

Xfce4 fully supports tabs and tab-based navigation.

You can configure size, color, background, etc.

Xfce4 terminal takes advantage of xfce composition effects.

You can configure the Xfce-terminal to act as a dropdown terminal if you want, which makes for greater ease of use.