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Gerald Nunn edited this page Jan 18, 2016 · 24 revisions

Here are the common frequently asked questions about Terminix.

General

Is there a 32 bit version available?

At this time there is no 32 bit version of Terminix available. Building and testing on 32 bit is a significant effort that we'd rather devote to development. The number of people using 32 bit Linux on the desktop is rather small and shrinking all the time so we feel it's the right choice at this time. Having said that, if someone wants to build and test Terminix on a 32 bit platform we'd be happy to accept any PRs to fix 32 bit issues.

Why use D instead of <insert language> here

My background is in Java and J2EE and while I do some Python programming (via Jython), I have a preference for statically typed languages in the C family. I've played around with D in the past and have been impressed with it's language design and efficiency in comparison and coming from Java it was relatively easy to learn. Finally, D has a very complete GTK binding in the form of GtkD whereas other languages I considered (Go and Rust) do not.

User Interface

Why are the terminal title bars so large?

Terminix complies with the Gnome HIG and the UI of terminix is inspired by Gnome Builder. At some point we hope to add an option for a compact user interface that would reduce the titlebars and some of the other ui elements but at this point it is a low priority feature.

Why aren't sessions displayed as tabs?

While we don't have anything against a tabbed user interface, we really wanted to try something different with Terminix. Most text editors use tabbed interfaces for navigating between open files, Gnome Builder is trying something different in this regard and we were curious to see how well this would work for a terminal emulator.

Having said that, Issue #12 is open with respect to incorporating tabs into the interface and will remain open to allow users to comment on it.

When I split a terminal it starts in the home directory instead of inheriting the directory

In Terminix the intention is that a split terminal should open in the same directory as the terminal that was split. The issue is caused by an issue in VTE configuration. This page has more information on the issue and how to correct it.

Notifications

What are notifications?

Terminix has a feature whereby it can send a notification to the desktop when a long running processes ends and terminix is not visible. Additionally, if terminix is the top level window but the process ended in a session which is not visible terminix will display the notification in the header bar.

Why aren't notifications working for me?

Currently notifications in Terminix required a version of the VTE widget that was patched by Fedora. This patch has not yet been accepted by upstream but is available in some other distributions such as Arch. In Arch it is available via the vte-notification-common and vte3-notification packages.

I have the notification packages but it's still not working

One reason this feature doesn't work on Arch is because of the VTE configuration issue. Please see this page for more information on it and how to correct it.

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