If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, you have probably felt the pain of juggling multiple terminal windows or constantly alt-tabbing between sessions. Terminator fixes that. It lets you split a single window into as many panes as you want, group them together, and even type in all of them at once. Once you get used to it, going back to a regular terminal feels genuinely uncomfortable.

This post is a complete reference for everything Terminator can do - shortcuts, launch flags, plugins, and a few tips I find genuinely useful day to day.

Installation

sudo apt install terminator        # Debian / Ubuntu / Mint
sudo yum install terminator        # RHEL / CentOS / Fedora
sudo pacman -S terminator          # Arch Linux
sudo zypper install terminator     # OpenSUSE
sudo emerge -a x11-terms/terminator # Gentoo

Splitting and Layout

This is the core of what makes Terminator different. You can split your window both ways and keep splitting from there.

Shortcut Action
Ctrl + Shift + E Split terminal vertically (side by side)
Ctrl + Shift + O Split terminal horizontally (top and bottom)
Ctrl + Shift + W Close the current pane
Ctrl + Shift + Q Quit Terminator entirely
Alt + L Open the layout launcher

Between any two panes you will see a thin grab handle. You can click and drag it to resize panes however you like, the same way you would in a tiling window manager.

Once you have a few panes open, jumping between them with the keyboard is much faster than reaching for the mouse.

Shortcut Action
Alt + ↑ Move focus to the terminal above
Alt + ↓ Move focus to the terminal below
Alt + ← Move focus to the terminal on the left
Alt + → Move focus to the terminal on the right
Ctrl + Shift + N Focus the next terminal
Ctrl + Shift + P Focus the previous terminal

Tabs

Terminator supports tabs on top of splits, so you can have multiple independent tab groups each with their own split layouts.

Shortcut Action
Ctrl + Shift + T Open a new tab
Ctrl + PageDown Switch to next tab
Ctrl + PageUp Switch to previous tab
Ctrl + Alt + A Rename current tab

Focus, Zoom and Fullscreen

Shortcut Action
F11 Toggle fullscreen
Ctrl + Shift + X Maximize current terminal
Ctrl + Shift + Z Zoom into current terminal

These two are worth explaining properly because they look similar but behave differently.

Ctrl+Shift+X (Maximize) hides all your other panes and expands the current one to fill the Terminator window. The font size stays exactly the same. Toggle it again and everything comes back exactly where it was.

Ctrl+Shift+Z (Zoom) does the same thing but also scales up the font and content so the text gets bigger. Think of it like a presentation mode - useful when you are screensharing or want to focus on a single terminal without squinting.

So in short: X just clears the clutter, Z clears the clutter and zooms in visually.

Broadcast Mode (the best feature)

This is the one that makes people go “wait, what?” when they see it for the first time. Broadcast mode lets you type in one terminal and have it appear in all of them simultaneously. If you ever manage multiple servers, this saves an enormous amount of time.

Shortcut Action
Super + G Group all terminals, input goes to all of them
Super + Shift + G Remove grouping from all terminals
Super + T Group all terminals in the current tab only
Super + Shift + T Remove grouping from the current tab
Alt + A Broadcast to all terminals
Alt + G Broadcast to grouped terminals only
Alt + O Turn broadcasting off

(Super is the Windows key on most keyboards.)

Shortcut Action
Ctrl + Shift + C Copy selected text
Ctrl + Shift + V Paste from clipboard
Ctrl + Shift + F Search within the terminal scrollback
Ctrl + Shift + S Toggle the scrollbar

Font Size

Shortcut Action
Ctrl + + Increase font size
Ctrl + - Decrease font size
Ctrl + 0 Reset font size to default

Reset and Clear

Shortcut Action
Ctrl + Shift + R Reset terminal state (fixes a misbehaving terminal)
Ctrl + Shift + G Reset terminal state and clear the window

Renaming Things

Shortcut Action
Ctrl + Alt + W Rename the window title
Ctrl + Alt + A Rename the tab title
Ctrl + Alt + X Rename the terminal pane title

Drag and Drop

You can physically move panes around by dragging them. Click and hold on a terminal’s titlebar (the colored strip at the top of each pane) and drag it somewhere else in the layout. The drop zone gets highlighted so you know where it will land.

If you prefer using the mouse without the titlebar, hold Ctrl, click and hold the right mouse button, then release Ctrl and drag.

Launch Flags

These are options you pass when starting Terminator from the command line.

Command What it does
terminator -m Start maximized
terminator -b Start borderless (no window decorations)
terminator -H Hide the window on startup
terminator -l <name> Launch with a saved layout
terminator -e <command> Run a specific command instead of your shell
terminator --new-tab Open a new tab in an already running instance
terminator --toggle-visibility Toggle visibility of a running instance (Wayland)
terminator -d Enable debug output

Saving and Loading Layouts

If you always open Terminator with the same split configuration, save it as a layout so you do not have to rebuild it every time.

  1. Arrange your panes exactly how you want them
  2. Right-click and go to Preferences → Layouts
  3. Click Add, give it a name, and save
  4. Next time, launch it directly with terminator -l your-layout-name

Profiles and Customization

Everything visual about Terminator is customizable through Profiles. Right-click anywhere and go to Preferences.

Under Profiles you can change colors, fonts, cursor shape, and how many lines of scrollback history to keep. Under Keybindings you can remap literally every shortcut listed in this post to whatever you prefer. All the shortcuts here are just the defaults.

Plugins

Terminator has a plugin system for extra functionality. You can enable them under Preferences -> Plugins.

Some useful ones are ActivityWatch (notifies you when a terminal goes quiet or active), Logger (saves terminal output to a file), and CustomCommandsMenu (lets you add your own commands to the right-click menu).