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Leo Laporte A technology journalist, author and broadcast personality. His specialties lie in computers, the Web, video games, digital music and consumer electronics. |
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Amber MacArthur An experienced Web content and usability strategist, Amber is also a tech journalist who specializes in Internet, software, and gadget trends and tips. |
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The command line is not only beautiful, it should be embraced
From time to time, somebody asks me which, of all the Linux applications out there, I consider indispensable. I came up with a very interesting answer. It was a command shell run inside some kind of terminal emulator. While this may seem extremely basic, the terminal program has come a long way since the days of the venerable xterm. For those of you who are too young to remember this, we call them terminal programs (or emulators) as opposed to something like shell windows, because they were software desktop equivalents of the physical terminals we once had physically connected to the mainframe system.
Shell access rocks! It rocks so hard, that after years of rah, rah'ing the GUI, Microsoft has actually produced a next generation shell for Vista, Monad, and they are making a big deal of it. Let's leave the imitator behind though and look at some very cool things in the shell world. For starters, try typing "cal" at the shell. Now, type "cal 2006". How about finger, date, tar, and a host of other commands that are so much faster to use at the command line than by going through a GUI.
I've used quite a number of terminal programs over the years. Originally, it was just a plain xterm (likely available on most Linux systems). Dressing it up meant changing the font color or background and not much else. For instance, to start a plain xterm with a steel blue background and red text, I would do the following.
xterm -background "SteelBlue" -foreground "Red"
There are tons of terminal programs and I have tried and liked several over the years. Then came the first terminal emulator I really fell in love with, one I still enjoy to this very day. It's called Eterm. Besides looking great, Eterm has some very cool features going for it. For one, an Eterm can have a variety of background images and in fact, comes with several. Some of these are tiled pixmaps and others are full background images.
You can change the font size, the brightness, contrast, scrollbar style, and much more. You can even create and customize your own menu. If you are happy with the settings you have modified, click Eterm on the menu bar and select Save User Settings. Eterm is themable as well. Click the Themes link on the Eterm Web site and you'll see several which you can download and install on your system. These are all tarred and gzipped bundles. To install them, create a .Eterm directory in your $HOME directory and then create a themes directory below that. All you have to do now is extract the theme into that directory and it will be available.
One of my favorite features of Eterm, however, is that you can make it transparent. I find this particularly nice because it lets me keep an eye on system logs as they scroll across my desktop and my current favorite wallpaper. All you have to do is click Background on the menu bar and select Toggle Transparency.
These days, there's another feature in terminal programs that has me excited, and that's tabs. No need to open three or four terminal applications (which can take up a fair amount of real estate). Take a look at the KDE Konsole program for instance. Not only does it provide basic shell access, but it also allows you to run multiple shells in tabbed sessions. To start a tabbed konsole session, just click Session on the menu bar and select New Shell. Then, customize the tabs by double clicking on them and giving them a name. When you are running multiple shells — a compile here, a monitor session there, and a root shell in yet another tab — naming your tabs makes a lot of sense. Notice as well when you clicked the Session menu that there were several options including starting a session in a bookmarked location.
Bookmarks? Say you find yourself going to the same directories over and over again. Sure you can type quickly and get to where you want to go, but Konsole extends its capabilities by letting you assign bookmarks. When you are in that familiar directory seven levels deep, just click Bookmarks on the menu bar, then select Add Bookmark. You can assign a name to the location you want and open a shell in that location with a single click.
And of course, I can't move on without mentioning transparency. To enable transparency in Konsole, click Settings on the menu bar, then Schema, and select one of the Konsole transparencies from there. While you are in that settings menu, you'll see tons of configuration options for the Konsole terminal program. Change the font, go to full screen mode, change the encoding, the keyboard layout, or set an alarm to inform you when changes take place in one of your tabbed sessions. You can explore the Konsole features on your own, but I will leave you with a nice script to start a clean, transparent Konsole to track your log file.
Let's wrap this up with one last, very cool program called QuadKonsole. I decided it was great because I started using it regularly as soon as I discovered it. As the name implies, Simon Perreault's Quadkonsole starts up four konsole programs in a grid. No need to line up your konsoles side by side or click from one shell tab to the next. To make things even nicer, the quadkonsole only creates one task in the task bar, leaving your Kicker panel uncluttered.
Each running konsole can be modified at will by right-clicking on it, choosing Settings, then selecting the changes you are interested in from the menu. For instance, you may want one to be transparent, another white on black with smaller fonts, and so on. After all, each is a konsole and as such can be modified accordingly. If you are feeling particularly distracted, you can tell quadkonsole to start with more than just four konsoles. Just specify the number of rows and columns as follows.
quadkonsole -rows 4 -columns 4
Cool, eh?
RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Marcel's Website : http://www.marcelgagne.com
Eterm : http://www.eterm.org
Konsole : http://www.kde.org
QuadKonsole : http://nomis80.org/
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ABOUT THE GUEST
Marcel Gagné is probably best known as the award-winning author of the Linux Journal ‘Cooking with Linux Series', for which he received the Readers' Choice award for favorite column five years in a row. His next book, titled "Moving to Ubuntu", will be out at the end of July 2006. One of the best known voices of the Linux world, he has written numerous articles on Linux and open source projects for various publications including Linux Journal, InformIT, Unix Review, SysAdmin magazine, and others. He also appears regularly as the Linux guy on 's "Call for Help". A long-time systems and network administrator, Marcel is a published science fiction author and editor, a pilot, an avid science and astronomy buff, and a former top 40 disc jockey.
