xfce4-terminal 0.0.2 is out

[Randy Chung]

Speaking of tabs, I thought I'd throw in my two cents as well.

I'm normally a urxvt (unicode-d rxvt) user for simply sys-admin-y stuff,
and using screen with it works great.  Very fast, very lightweight, and
it makes me smile.

When I'm doing development work, though, Konsole ranks infinitely higher
than urxvt precisely because it has tab support (and some neat features
with it too).  

Using screen to multiplex a single terminal window kind of works, but
the key sequence to change to the window I want isn't very comfortable. 
One, the key stroke sequence is more complicated than holding shift and
pressing a direction with an arrow key (konsole-style).  Two, being able
to see all my tabs laid out at once lets me release session-number
mappings from my memory so I can keep other things on the mind instead. 

It's similar to Xfce 4.0's alt-tab window switching compared to KDE's,
where Xfce doesn't show you one list of your windows all at once (though
I see it's planned for 4.2, woohoo!), and KDE does, which makes it much
easier for me to know precisely how many tab presses it will take to get
me from program A to program B.  Seeing the tabs there lets me know how
many arrow presses it will take to get from source file A to source file
B.

I'm a very lazy person, and moving my hands from the keyboard to the
mouse breaks my flow of things.  I'm also a less than brilliant
individual, so I have to think "hmm now was it session 2 or session 5
that had the headers in it," which breaks my flow of things.  

Another great thing with konsole is being able to send keystrokes to
every window, which works well if I want to start a bunch of tabs, and
then have them all go to the same directory, or have them all quit vi at
once, or have them all close at once.  While not directly related to
tabs themselves, the functionality makes the usage of tabs much easier
and keeps me a happy user.

Of course, all of Konsole's niftiness comes at a significant cost, but
the benefits to my productivity and general coding-happiness score makes
it worth it.  Konsole is the only reason I keep any part of KDE in my
system still (and since my disk is small it's eating a ridiculous
percentage of it...but it's worth it).

That said, tollbars and menus are nice things to have for users who
aren't familiar with your program yet.  I think it'd be best to leave
them on by default, but give the option of removing them for the more
advanced users (who will, presumably, be bright enough to figure out how
to remove them).

That's my two cents (though with that length it seems more like two
dollars).  I'm looking forward to an interesting discussion on this
topic, and would be glad to contribute development time to it :)

--

Randy

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 23:25, purslow at sympatico.ca wrote:
> in a terminal, i don't see the need for tabs, toolbars or menus:
> you can simply open more instances & a R-click menu might give a few options.
> fonts -- incl varying sizes -- are very important.
> also, interface with the session manager (when 4.2 arrives),
> st history cb preserved: it sb possible to keep eg  5 K  lines of history,
> tho' there mb a problem with multiple terminals & history (last one open?). 
> 
> just my  CAD 0,02 .