Terminal That Tells You When It's Done

I spend a lot of my day waiting for my computer to finish doing what it's doing. For example, I might be waiting for a backup, a file copy, or a build to finish.

In the mean time, I usually read my email, do some other work, or browse the web, but I want to come back to that job as soon as the computer's ready.

Now I can, and so can you if you run Linux.

First, check out, compile, and install the latest version of VTE.

Next, check out the source code for GNOME Terminal 2.24, apply the latest patch from GNOME Bug 557593, run autogen.sh, make, make install, and you should be done.

Finally, make your shell output a bell character (Ctrl+G) when it prints the prompt. For example, in bash you can put PS1="\\007$PS1" at the bottom of your ~/.bashrc.

When you're done, you should be able to do this...









Technically, it works by setting the X urgency hint on the terminal window. Your window list or task bar will know to flash the window's icon when this happens.

The patch also makes the tab's title bold so you can tell which tab or tabs are finished.

For Windows users, there's a similar feature in PuTTY. Of course, it doesn't support tabs, but it should still be pretty useful.

Go to the Bell section in your preferences and set the Taskbar/caption indication on bell option to Flashing.



You'll still need to add the bell to your shell prompt as above.

Terminals

Eterm	Yes
GNOME Terminal	Patch
KDE Konsole	No?
PuTTY	Since beta 0.52
rxvt-unicode	Since 8.3
XFCE Terminal	Patch

Window Managers

dwm	Yes
Enlightenment	Since 0.16.8
Fluxbox	Since 1.0rc
GNOME Window List	Since 2.12
ion3	Yes?
KDE Kicker	Since 3.2.0?
Openbox	No?
Windows Explorer	Yes
Xmonad	Yes

Better GNOME Terminal Copy and Paste

In most programs these days, you press Ctrl+C to copy to the clipboard.

In GNOME Terminal on Linux it's Ctrl+Shift+C and in PuTTY on Windows it happens as soon as you select some text.

This was confusing me until I found a great feature of GNOME Terminal:

1. Click on the Edit menu, then on Keyboard Shortcuts...
2. Click on Copy, then type Ctrl+C

Now Ctrl+C will act as copy if some text is selected, but it still acts as the interrupt key to stop a program if there's nothing selected.

The GNOME Edit Keyboard Shortcuts menu

Ctrl+C with something highlighted

Ctrl+C with nothing highlighted

GNOME Without Borders

I run a lot of terminal sessions on my computer desktop so I can connect to some remote servers.

In GNOME, the terminal always starts out small, and then I have to click on the icon in the top right corner of the window to maximize it.

It also displays the title once in the title bar, and a second time in the tab title, which used up some of the screen unnecessarily.

No more!

The best solution I've found uses Openbox.

I installed it using Yum, then ran it once from the command line with the --replace option. After that, GNOME remembered to start it up instead of its default window manager, Metacity.

Then I created ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml with the following applications section:

<applications>
    <application class="Firefox*">
      <maximized>true</maximized>
      <decor>no</decor>
    </application>
    <application class="Gnome-terminal">
      <maximized>true</maximized>
      <decor>no</decor>
    </application>
    <application class="Terminal">
      <maximized>true</maximized>
      <decor>no</decor>
    </application>
</applications>

Now Firefox and my terminals start up maximized and without a title.

My GNOME desktop without window borders

On the rare occasion I need to turn borders back on, I can press Alt+Space then click on Decorate from the menu.