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Article submitted by Hugo Carrer.
As any other Debian user I love writing obscure commands on my terminal. I love too having so many open terminals that I have to come up with a special system to find the one where my favorite obscure command is running on.
To be able to enjoy this I need a very fast multitabbed terminal emulator: mrxvt.
Some of the things I like the most about mrxvt are for example,
- It is very fast and light.
- Fast pseudo-transparency.
- Background with your favorite images.
- Highly configurable keyboard shortcuts.
- You can have the same command typed on every tab at the same time. This feature is disabled by default. you can enable it by editing
/etc/mrxvt/mrxvtrc and uncommenting the ToggleBroadcast macro (around line 171). After that, Ctrl+Shift+d toggles input broadcasting to all tabs.
- Automatic or “by-hand” tab labeling.
- It is independent of your desktop (no KDE or GNOME needed).
- Did I mention that is very fast and light?
After installing it would look something like this:
You can change this rather old fashioned look by copying the example config file from
/usr/share/doc/mrxvt-common/examples/mrxvtrc.sample.gz
And placing it in ~/.mrxvtrc
The file is full of comments helping you with the meaning of each option. Of course you can find all available options in the man page. Some useful shortcuts are Ctrl-shift-t to open a new tab and Ctrl-shift-m to show the menu.
So, after playing, trying and tweaking for a little while you can get a futuristic look for your terminals. Like this one of me sketching this article on an emacs session inside mrxvt (Note all those beautiful tabs up there)
Downsides? Well it depends on the kind of user,
- No UTF-8 support.
- It has no config menu.
- You have to remember the shortcuts or read the config file every now and then.
- And as with anything worth doing, to get things working the way you want to you’ll have to read through the man page and maybe scratch your head once or twice but it’ll work.
To sum up, it’s the perfect application to config during those boring rainy weekends and then show off to your friends at work.
mrxvt is available in Debian stable and in Ubuntu too.
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