Terminology: More Than A Terminal Emulator (Ubuntu Installation Instructions)

Terminology is a relatively new terminal emulator written for the Enlightenment desktop, but it can be used in other desktop environments. The application comes with many cool features, some of which do not exist in any other terminal emulator.

Besides features that are already available in other terminal emulators such as split views support, Terminology can do a lot of things you wouldn't expect from a terminal emulator, like displaying thumbnails for images, videos and documents and furthermore, it also allows you to preview those files directly from Terminology.

That's not all Terminology can do. Other features included in the latest 0.3 release:

• tabs support (although these aren't like the tabs you've seen in other applications - they look like a desktop switcher / expose); the tab switcher has live thumbnail content;
• custom background support and transparency (and each tab or slip can have its own background; supported backgrounds: bitmap, scalable/vector, animated gif, videos);
• text / links drag and drop;
• themes for the layout and design;
• URL, file path and email address detection and link-handling;
• inline display of link content;
• works in X11 and Wayland;
• can be touch controlled;
• scan scale by UI scaling factors;
• can render using OpenGL or OpenGL-ES2;
• block text selection;
• cool visual bell that can be themed;
• comes with a few built-in color schemes, including the popular Solarized light / dark;
• more!

Terminology "tabs"

Previewing a video file

"tycat" command allows previewing files

Below you can watch a video recorded by the Terminology developer, demoing the application (unfortunately, the resolution isn't great but it should be enough to get an idea on what Terminology can do):

(direct video link)

Using Terminology

Here are a few Terminology usage tips:

1. To set a background image use "tybg image.jpg" (where "image.jpg" is the image you want to use). The background can be a jpg, png and you can even use animated backgrounds, such as videos for instance. To reset the background, use: tybg ""

2. To get a list of files with thumbnails, use "tyls -m". Please note that in my test under Ubuntu, the thumbnails only showed up for some image files, probably because of some missing dependency. Clicking on the thumbnail opens the Terminology external file previewer.

3. To preview a file, besides clicking on the thumbnail as stated above, you can also use "find /path/to/some/folder", etc., for example "find ~/Videos", and then click on the file - the full path is required so this won't work for "ls" for instance. You can also use "typop file".

You can also preview a file in the terminal by using "tycat file".

4. To switch between tabs, use Ctrl + PageUp / PageDown. These keyboard shortcuts are hardcoded for now so you can't change them.

Install Terminology in Ubuntu

Terminology is included by default in Bodhi Linux (which is based on Ubuntu) so if you're running Bodhi, it should already be installed.

To install the latest Terminology in Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04, you can use the PPA below which provides daily builds for E17, EFL and some apps:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hannes-janetzek/enlightenment-svn
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install terminology

You can also use the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries stable PPA, but currently this PPA provides Terminology 0.2 (the latest being 0.3).

Arch Linux users can install Terminology via AUR.

For other Linux distributions, get Terminology from HERE.