Terminus - A Super Modern Terminal App for Linux

The terminal is the Linux tool which is mostly used and it sometimes appears as our default environment. We can need to tune it by modifying its appearance. So you can need to make it more attractive for you. On Linux you have a new terminal tool which offers you that possibility which is named Terminus.

What is Terminus?

Terminus is a web technology based terminal heavily inspired by Hyper. It is available on some operating system platforms and customizable with multiple app themes and a myriad of community color schemes for the terminal. Some developers see it as a terminal for a more modern age. It offers the possibility to work with some tabs that you can add graphically with a simple click. When writing this article, Terminus is an alpha version.

1) Install terminus

To install terminus, go to the official site where you can choose the appropriate platform. Terminus works with screen package so you need to have it installed too in order to be sure that terminus will be installed. Let's download our package

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On Centos

# wget https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus/releases/download/v1.0.0-alpha.18/terminus-1.0.0-alpha.18.rpm

Now we can install it. If you don't have screen installed, do it before

# yum install -y screen && rpm -ivh terminus-1.0.0-alpha.18.rpm
.....................................
Preparing... ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing...
 1:terminus-1.0.0_alpha.18-96 ################################# [100%]

On Ubuntu

# wget https://github.com/Eugeny/terminus/releases/download/v1.0.0-alpha.18/terminus_1.0.0-alpha.18_amd64.deb

# apt-get install -y screen && dpkg -i terminus_1.0.0-alpha.18_amd64.deb

You can have the error below when trying to install terminus on your Linux system

terminus: error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

On Centos, install libXScrnSaver package then retry with terminus

# yum install -y libXScrnSaver

On Ubuntu, install libxss1 package. You could also need to install libasound2 package then retry to install terminus

# apt-get install -y libxss1 libasound2

2) Launch terminus

To start using your new terminal, you can launch it via the default terminal or by enter terminus on the dashboard.

You can see that it offers you the possibility to open a new terminal or to go through settings to modify its default appearance. When you choose New terminal you can see that it will open you a new terminal tab where you can normally work as on your default terminal.

You can normally modify a text or script with you favorite text editor like vim. You can see that terminus has the syntax coloration

3) Customize terminus

Now we will explore the given settings of our new terminal. We will now choose settings. 

a) Application

This menu offers you the possibility to

• change the theme
• modify the position of the tab
• to indicate the position where to dock terminus
• to choose the windows frame

You can see that we have some tabs opened and the plus (+) sign to add new tabs on the top

b) Hotkeys

There are all the available keyboard shortcuts of Terminus. You can notice that some hotkeys are the main screen commands. We can understand why Terminus needs screen to be installed on your Linux system in order to work.

c) Plugin

Terminus works with plugins which can be installed directly from this settings interface. To install the plugin, you need to have npm installed. The two interesting plugins of terminus offer the functionalities:

• clickable-links: makes paths and URLs in the terminal clickable
• theme-hype: a Hyper inspired theme

d) Terminal

This option offers you the possibility to modify the

• coloration of the text on your terminal. You can see the preview which show you the final result of your choice
• default font to use
• default shell that you want to use

You have a long list of color scheme which will give several choices about the coloration that you want

Terminus offers you a list of shells. With the normal terminal, you can change your default shell but Terminus simplifies you this process and helps you to easily modify this information at any time.

The list of shells on the screenshot above concerns Terminus on Centos 7. For those who will choose to install Terminus on Ubuntu, you will have screen shell in the list as on the screenshot below

You can see that on the two screenshots we don't exactly have the same shells.

Conclusion

Terminus is a new terminal tool which easily offers the possibility to customize the visual aspect of your default environment. Terminus is optimized for quick power users with features like spawn with a global hotkey, tabs that persist after restart, full Unicode and double-width character support, and auto-dock to any side of any screen. When using Terminux, you can make reports on the official github project to improve the tool.