terminalle 0.4

A fancy drop-down terminal emulateur.

TERMINALLE

A modern, minimalist, semi-transparent fullscreen "drop-down" terminal emulateur for freedesktop.org-compatible desktops (e.g. GNOME, KDE).

It omits many features common in other terminal emulators, such as tabs, because it's meant to be used in conjunction with a terminal multiplexer such as tmux, which offers a solid, mature UI. See also tmux mode for enhanced tmux features.

Based on VTE, the business logic of this Python package is contained entirely in a ~200-line file, making it easy to inspect and modify.

Usage

Use D-Bus to control the application.

# See usage info.
$ terminalle --help

# Start the server. The window is initially hidden by default.
# This is unnecessary if you've enabled auto-start with `terminalle auto`.
$ terminalle &

# Toggle window visibility.
$ dbus-send --session --type=method_call --dest=party.will.Terminalle /party/will/Terminalle party.will.Terminalle.Toggle

# Close the window and kill the server.
$ dbus-send --session --type=method_call --dest=party.will.Terminalle /party/will/Terminalle party.will.Terminalle.Quit

In addition to Toggle and Quit, there are four methods to move the terminal window between monitors: MoveRight, MoveLeft, MoveDown, and MoveUp, each of which moves the window to the next adjacent monitor in a particular direction. This only works while the window is open. See shortcuts for info on mapping keybindings to these D-Bus methods.

Use Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V to access the clipboard.

Install

$ pip install terminalle

# Optional: start the server automatically on login and restart automatically if exited.
$ terminalle auto

# Optional: disable auto-start (if enabled, this should be done prior to uninstalling).
$ terminalle no-auto

Shortcuts

You almost certainly want to hook up the toggle method to a keybinding for easy access. In GNOME, you can either do that in the GNOME Control Center (a.k.a "Settings"), or with gsettings:

# WARNING: Running this verbatim will disable any other custom keybindings.
#          It is merely provided as an example.
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings "['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/']"

# WARNING: This will overwrite any existing custom keybinding called 'custom0'.
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ name "Toggle Terminalle"
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ command "dbus-send --session --type=method_call --dest=party.will.Terminalle /party/will/Terminalle party.will.Terminalle.Toggle"
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ binding "<Super>Return"

If you use multiple monitors, considering hooking up shortcuts for the aforementioned movement methods as well.

KDE can configure shortcuts to call D-Bus methods directly.

Configuration

See an example configuration. See the defaults in settings.py. Defaults can be selectively overridden in ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/terminalle.yaml (typically, ${HOME}/.config/terminalle.yaml).

TMUX MODE

This is the recommended way to use Terminalle. It enables some alternative tmux keyboard shortcuts, which would normally be impossible to configure in .tmux.conf since terminal emulators typically cannot handle these key combinations. Generally replacing the tmux prefix with a simple Ctrl modifier, it cuts the number of keystrokes in half without requiring you to memorize new shortcuts. If you're a tmux power-user, this will change things for you. Turn it on by setting tmux: true in terminalle.yaml (see configuration).

The following shortcuts are enabled in tmux mode:

tmux default	tmux mode	Command
<Prefix> "	Ctrl+"	split-window
<Prefix> %	Ctrl+%	split-window -h
<Prefix> {	Ctrl+{	swap-pane -U
<Prefix> }	Ctrl+}	swap-pane -D
<Prefix> [	Ctrl+[	copy-mode
<Prefix> ]	Ctrl+]	paste-buffer

To reap maximum benefits, add the following to your .tmux.conf, taking care of other common tmux shortcuts that do not get mangled by typical terminal emulators:

# Generally shorten `Ctrl+b <X>` to `Ctrl+<X>` for various `<X>`.
bind -n C-Up     resize-pane -U
bind -n C-Down   resize-pane -D
bind -n C-Left   resize-pane -L
bind -n C-Right  resize-pane -R

# Generally shorten `Ctrl+b Meta+<X>` to `Meta+<X>`.
bind -n M-Up     resize-pane -U 5
bind -n M-Down   resize-pane -D 5
bind -n M-Left   resize-pane -L 5
bind -n M-Right  resize-pane -R 5

# Note that `new-window` is not shortened because `Ctrl+c` should send `SIGINT`.
bind -n C-n      next-window
bind -n C-p      previous-window
bind -n C-Space  next-layout
bind -n C-x      confirm-before -p 'kill-pane #P? (y/n)' kill-pane

This all goes especially well with vim-tmux-navigator, which provides shortened bindings for switching seemlessly between tmux panes and Vim windows.