ROXTerm is a terminal emulator intended to provide similar features to gnome-terminal, based on the same VTE library. It was originally designed to have a smaller footprint and quicker start-up time by not using the Gnome libraries and by using a separate applet to provide the configuration GUI, but thanks to all the features it's acquired over the years ROXTerm can probably now be accused of bloat. However, it is more configurable than gnome-terminal and aimed more at "power" users who make heavy use of terminals.
It can be used as a ROX application, as the name implies, or in any other X environment.
Visit the SourceForge project page to download release files or use other Sourceforge tools. If you want to get developmental versions ahead of releases, use subversion. Although there is a CVS repository it's obsolete. The actual command you will probably want to use to check out a snapshot is:
svn co https://roxterm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/roxterm/trunk/roxterm ROXTerm
You need the libraries for GTK+2 which is pretty much standard on all free Unix derivatives these days. It definitely needs at least version 2.6 of glib and probably GTK+ 2.6 too. You will also need libglade 2 - usually, but not always installed; libvte, a Gnome component; and D-BUS (see below).
To compile ROXTerm you will need the header files for all the above libraries. In packaging systems they usually come in packages whose names end in "-dev" or "-devel".
Additionally, to build a subversion checkout of ROXTerm you need autoconf, automake and libtool. Use the latest versions possible. Old versions of automake (older than 1.7?) will cause building to fail because ROXTerm uses per-target CFLAGS.
D-Bus is a messaging system which ROXTerm uses to connect terminals with its configure tool. ROXTerm uses the "session" bus, which should be started along with your desktop environment. Current versions of ROX, GNOME and KDE session managers all launch D-Bus. If you use some other session/desktop/window manager which doesn't launch D-Bus you can start it by inserting something like this near the start of your .xinitrc or .xsession:
if test -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ; then
eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session`
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
fi
The reason for using a bespoke configuration messaging system over D-Bus instead of gconf is because gconf doesn't provide a way to map an arbitrary number of profiles onto configuration filenames.
To install ROXTerm for ROX all you need to do is unpack the tarball in your Apps directory and run it from there, but you will probably want to rename the folder to ROXTerm. For other systems ROXTerm may be installed in the same way as any autoconf-based source package:
./configure make make install
If you are using a version fetched by svn instead of a release tarball run the bootstrap.sh script first to create the configure script and various other files needed for building.
Up-to-date official Debian packages are now available. See http://packages.debian.org/roxterm. For those that want to build their own debian packages, the debian packaging files used to have a separate module in subversion but this has now been merged into the main trunk.
For instructions on building a debian package refer to the file INSTALL.Debian in the tarball/svn working directory.
Ubuntu also has official roxterm packages, but due to Ubuntu's release cycle these may lag behind the latest upstream releases. Therefore I have set up a PPA at https://launchpad.net/~h-realh/+archive/ppa to provide the most recent releases of ROXTerm for Ubuntu's current release when appropriate.
As a user of a terminal emulator you should not require much help, so this guide is very concise, covering just the more unusual features.
Each window can contain a number of tabs, each with its own terminal. Unlike gnome-terminal and earlier versions of ROXTerm, the tab bar is always shown by default, even if there is only one tab, to avoid resizing inconsistencies, but this is configurable.
When the menu bar is hidden the popup menu duplicates the same items as in the menu bar; this gives you full access to all the functions with the menu bar hidden. The menu bar is effectively redundant but provided to make ROXTerm appear more straightforward for first-time users. It can be turned on and off for a particular window or more permanently by using the configuration manager.
The popup menu also allows email and web addresses to be opened in external applications if such an address is highlighted by the pointer being over it.
When the pointer is over an address that ROXTerm recognises as a URI (typically a web URL or email address) it is highlighted by underlining and a change of pointer shape. You can open the address either by right-clicking on it and choosing Open... in the menu or by holding Ctrl and left-clicking. The applications used to handle these addresses may be set with the configuration tool, otherwise it will try to find a suitable default. Also by holding Ctrl you can drag a URI to pass it to another application which is willing to accept it as a URI or text; dragging it into the same window it came from pastes the address back in.
Note that if the pointer is over the server address portion of a URL it only highlights the address, omitting the filename; move the pointer over the filename to get the whole URL. Similarly you can highlight an email address with or without a leading mailto:.
You can now drag items onto terminal windows. Text objects are fed to the terminal as if typed. Files and URIs have their location (filename or URI) fed in rather than the object's contents. Graphical files can also be dragged onto the appropriate area of the configuration manager to set terminal background images. Holding down Ctrl while dragging a highlighted URI allows the address to be dragged to another application.
You can now drag tabs by their labels to reorder them within a window or to move them to another ROXTerm window or, by dropping them outside a ROXTerm window, move tabs to new windows of their own. Use mouse button 3 (the right button) to move an unselected tab without selecting it. Note that versions prior to 1.9 used button 2 (middle). Button 2 is now a shortcut to paste the contents of the clipboard as the tab's name.
Configuration is based on named profiles so you can save different sets of options and switch between them quickly. There are profiles for general options, colour schemes and keyboard shortcuts (sometimes also referred to as accelerators). Colour Schemes and Profiles apply to one tab at a time, but Keyboard Shortcuts apply to all tabs in the same window to avoid the potential for confusion from different tabs having different shortcuts for switching tabs. New windows and tabs inherit settings from the window/tab they were opened from.
Prior to version 1.15.1 all tabs had to share the same Profile, but this has been changed. In consequence a profile's font and other settings which affect a terminal's size may be overridden to keep geometry consistent across a number of tabs in one window.
The Preferences menu allows you to select the current profile etc (this setting will not be remembered; use the configuration manager to set the defaults), open the configuration manager to edit the current profile or colour scheme or to manage all settings. In the configuration manager you can select one of the four types of option groups and edit, copy, delete or rename it. Each item also has a radio button. The item with the selected radio is the default for new terminals. Note that character encodings are handled slightly differently.
There is no editor for keyboard shortcuts; instead they can be changed by
pressing keys while the mouse is hovering over a menu item in the terminal,
provided editable shortcuts are enabled in your desktop session. In GNOME you
have to edit a "secret" option, either by running the command:
gconftool --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels trueor by editing the /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels option with gconf-editor ("Configuration Editor").
You can also run the configuration manager by selecting "Configure..." in ROX's menu for the ROXTerm application or by running roxterm-config if ROXTerm has been installed conventionally.
Configuration files can easily be swapped with other users. Each profile, colour scheme and keyboard shortcut scheme has a single file associated with it; saving a valid file in the appropriate directory will create a profile etc with the same name as the file.
The directory locations for these configuration files follow the XDG Base Directory specification. In descending order of priority they are:
Files will be loaded from any and all the above locations; files in high priority locations shadow ones with the same name in lower priority locations. Files are only saved in the first location.
Within any or each of those locations, profiles are saved in a "Profiles" subdirectory, colour schemes in "Colours" and keyboard shortcut schemes in "Shortcuts". A file called "Globals" contains miscellaneous options which don't fall into the above categories, including the default profile etc for new terminals.
ROXTerm accepts a number of command-line options. Run
roxterm --help
for a full list.
From version 1.1.0 ROXTerm defaults to using only one process for all terminals so that you can drag tabs between windows. If you run the command again it sends a D-BUS message to the existing process to signal it to open a new terminal, and the second process exits. To make a roxterm command run in its own separate process use the --separate option.
Note that the --colour_scheme and --shortcut_scheme options have been replaced by --colour-scheme and --shortcut-scheme respectively in 1.7.0 (underscores changed to hyphens) but the old versions remain usable for backwards compatibility.
From version 1.14.0 advanced users can use D-Bus to configure terminals from other applications and scripts. There are three D-Bus methods especially for this purpose; they require an id code to target a specific terminal; each terminal's id code can be read from the environment variable ROXTERM_ID in the shell/application running in it. The D-Bus object path and interface for the methods are "net.sf.roxterm.Options" and "/net/sf/roxterm/Options" respectively. The methods are:
Example using dbus-send in a shell script:
dbus-send --session /net/sf/roxterm/Options \
net.sf.roxterm.Options.SetColourScheme string:$ROXTERM_ID string:GTK
You may also send D-Bus signals to change individual options within a named profile or colour scheme using the methods StringOption, IntOption (also used for boolean options) and FloatOption. All terminals using the named profile or colour scheme are affected, but only temporarily. The options are not saved for new terminals. The methods all take 3 arguments:
To see which option names you can use, check the config files, from which the types can be deduced.
Example using dbus-send in a shell script:
dbus-send --session /net/sf/roxterm/Options \
net.sf.roxterm.Options.StringOption \
string:Colours/GTK string:background 'string:#ffffff'