Terminator D-Bus

Python library to interact with Terminator through D-Bus.

Installation

pip install terminator-dbus

With uv:

uv tool install terminator-dbus

dbus-python needs the D-Bus development files when no system package or wheel is available.

Usage

Create one client and reuse it for all calls:

from terminator_dbus import Terminator

terminator = Terminator()
terminal = terminator.get_focused_terminal()

if terminal is not None:
    new_terminal = terminator.vsplit(
        terminal,
        {"execute": "htop", "title": "Processes"},
    )
    terminator.switch_profile(new_terminal, {"profile": "work"})

The client uses the current X11 or Wayland display by default. Pass display if the current environment does not identify the correct display:

terminator = Terminator(display=":1")

Pass bus_name when you already know the complete D-Bus service name:

terminator = Terminator(bus_name="net.tenshu.Terminator2...")

dbus.DBusException reports connection and remote method failures. Terminator itself returns strings that start with ERROR: for some tab and split failures.

D-Bus interface

This package follows the interface in Terminator 2.1.6 ipc.py.

• Base service and interface name: net.tenshu.Terminator2
• Object path: /net/tenshu/Terminator2
• Display-specific name: the base name followed by the MD5 digest of the GDK display name

Terminator removes the screen suffix before it creates the digest. Thus, :0 and :0.0 use the same service name.

The Terminator class exposes every method in the service:

Terminator does not assign identifiers to tabs. Its get_tab method returns an empty string for a terminal in a notebook.

The four *_cmdline methods require string-to-string dictionaries. The window and tab creation methods require the complete option mapping from Terminator's command-line parser.

Terminator does not declare D-Bus output signatures. dbus-python infers each output signature from the value returned by the service method.

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