Live data from Hacker News

Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

gnunn1.github.io

61–70 of 121 posts

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#61

I've been a long-time user of terminator on linux. I started playing around with tilix a couple of months ago, and really liked it. Interestingly though, what I finally realized is there is a huge amount of value in ditching both and switching over to tmux. Tmux does everything that tilix does but is completely independent of the underlying terminal. What I finally realized is that tmux is not just about persistent s…

I'm sort of in the same boat. I've tried Terminator and tiling window managers and finally realized that tmux is what I wanted all along(on tiling window managers it turns out I really only want to tile terminals).

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#62
post #4

Cool project! Given that the whole point of the tool is that it's a tiling terminal app, I'd appreciate a few more screenshots on the page or in the readme showing the different ways it lets me organise my terminals. I'm a big fan of Gnome's design with the unified title and toolbars. For a terminal app such as this, however, the fat title bar combined with the tab bar make for a fairly large and heavy looking header…

It's quite sad that I mostly lost interest when I saw it mentioned Gnome, because my experience is with Gnome is that either it will take too much space, or if I like it they will systematically take away the options that makes it possible for me to make it work the way I want.

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#63
post #55

I've been a long-time user of terminator on linux. I started playing around with tilix a couple of months ago, and really liked it. Interestingly though, what I finally realized is there is a huge amount of value in ditching both and switching over to tmux. Tmux does everything that tilix does but is completely independent of the underlying terminal. What I finally realized is that tmux is not just about persistent s…

Highlights one of the big issues in (Linux) desktop: nested inconsistent ad-hoc window management. Consider that in somewhat typical situation you would have your WM/compositor at top managing windows, then something like tilix managing its own panes/tabs, then tmux/screen also managing windows, and finally maybe vim/emacs which also does its own window management. That is four completely independent layers of window…

Too bad the Unix philosophy lost out to the Not Unix philosophy.

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#64
If you have to access the terminal frequently, a dropdown terminal emulator is the way to go. Press F12, the terminal comes down. Press F11 it goes to full screen. Press F12 again, it retracts. I use yakuake and can't imagine life without it.

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#65

Apologies for the off-topic, but does anyone know a nice simple terminal emulator to use with tiling window managers such as i3? I'm using the xfce terminal right now, but that supports tabs which gets a little confusing since so does i3.

mlterm. Idiosyncratic configuration, but hands down the best for vim users because it has a solution for the alt-8bit/escape-timeout problem.

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#66

It seems to me that terminals are one of those things that handles the most sensitive of details on a server. No offense to the project (which looks very nice), but shouldn't we prefer a terminal emulator that has been well audited for security issues?

What attack vector are you thinking of that makes a terminal emulator more vulnerable than any other piece of GUI software?

idk, perhaps passwords?

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#67
post #55

I've been a long-time user of terminator on linux. I started playing around with tilix a couple of months ago, and really liked it. Interestingly though, what I finally realized is there is a huge amount of value in ditching both and switching over to tmux. Tmux does everything that tilix does but is completely independent of the underlying terminal. What I finally realized is that tmux is not just about persistent s…

Highlights one of the big issues in (Linux) desktop: nested inconsistent ad-hoc window management. Consider that in somewhat typical situation you would have your WM/compositor at top managing windows, then something like tilix managing its own panes/tabs, then tmux/screen also managing windows, and finally maybe vim/emacs which also does its own window management. That is four completely independent layers of window…

Counterpoint: different tools and tasks have different requirements for interaction. Each tool provides an interface specialized to its workflow, and the hierarchical nature of the system allows me to split even inside the same tool for different workflows.

My primary window-organization tools are: i3 virtual desktops, web-browser, emacs, and tmux. i3 virtual desktops are named by task/workflow: I have one desktop for project management, one for emacs, one for terminals for one project, one for terminals for another project, one for work-related communication, and one for personal communication. Emacs does its thing and makes great use of it, but its spectacular profusion of buffers and its insane customization never pollutes the rest of my WM because it's contained within emacs. The browser desktops group related tabs, but they go one further and let me put tabs side-by-side without multiple windows of project management polluting my global window list. And so on and so forth.

Allowing each tool to specialize information management for its particular use case gives me much better performance overall. It's definitely specialized and idiosyncractic; I would not want to make everyone deal with it. But for me, doing this 8+ hours a day: every time I'm forced to work without that hierarchy and that specialization, I can tell you that the effort is worth it.

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#68

If you have to access the terminal frequently, a dropdown terminal emulator is the way to go. Press F12, the terminal comes down. Press F11 it goes to full screen. Press F12 again, it retracts. I use yakuake and can't imagine life without it.

Tilix supports this as well via a quake mode.

https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/manual/quake/

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#69

I've been a long-time user of terminator on linux. I started playing around with tilix a couple of months ago, and really liked it. Interestingly though, what I finally realized is there is a huge amount of value in ditching both and switching over to tmux. Tmux does everything that tilix does but is completely independent of the underlying terminal. What I finally realized is that tmux is not just about persistent s…

I use tmux but not always because i can not preload my systems' env. That seems to be a design decision and thus it cannot replace my terminal.

Re: Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator

#70
post #50

If tiling terminals aren't your thing, I'd suggest giving guake a go. I've been using for a year now, and none of the other emulators have come close to making me switch. Protip: Use the shortcuts wisely, it makes it much better to use. I personally use + and - on the keypad for new tab/close tab and End to hide/unhide.

Guake is pretty killer, I'm an avid user myself.

My one big issue is this bug (https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/45) which has an air of the user being wrong and the terminal being fine.

There are a few other nitpicks like the lack of search (no clue if other terminals have search, but it is a feature I would kill for).

Post reply on HN