A killer combination, byobu and terminator
May 22, 2010 by ciemon · 4 Comments
I was amused by someone today, specifically by their condescending tone when they suggested that byobu had nothing to offer the power user. Is there some other system that can show:
architecture, battery, cpu count, cpu freq, cpu temp, custom (user definable field), date, disk size and use, ec2 cost, fan speed, host name, ip address, load average, memory available and used, network traffic, processes, reboot required, services running, time (system and utc), update info, uptime, users and a few other things too, all in two lines of constantly updating text an example of which is below?
The other smart thing that byobu provides is multiple shell sessions from one login, which are effectively tabbed, making it easy to maintain multiple logins, sessions etc all over one ssh connection. Of course, they’re all maintained when you drop the ssh connection and you log back in to the existing byobu session.
Now, if you happen to have access to multiple servers, then terminator is also an excellent piece of software because it provides multiple terminals in one window:
Each of those terminals can be maximised (Ctrl+Shift X) whilst the others remain connected and working in the background. Zoom out, Alt-Tab to the next server and you have fast access, with an overview of everything.
One part of terminator that I don’t use is standard tabbed windows, mainly because I don’t have that many servers to work with, but it’s possible to take that image above, make a new tab, and have a similar layout with a bunch of other servers, at which point your head explodes trying to keep track of where you are.
So… can someone tell me of an alternative to this awesome combination?
You know screen can be split, right? Vertical and Horizontal splits are possible.
“man screen” for more info!
Matthew: screen absolutely can do that, and similarly you can use tiling window managers to achieve the same sort of effect as Terminator, and I thoroughly encourage people to try things like that.
I didn’t really enjoy either extreme, so I started the Terminator project. Three and a half years later I think we offer a very compelling feature set for a terminal emulator.
There might even be people using screen splits inside Terminator running in a tiling window manager
I swear by Terminator.
I love byobu.
tmux is sweet!
One of the problems I had when using byobu is that it was alot slowed that tmux for simple things, such as irssi. tmux is also starting to include some of the ‘widgets’ that byobu has by default.
I really like byobu and terminator combo – it’s kewl – but for lightweight screen replacement (if you don’t need all the wigdets, but do want multiple windows over 1 connection, try tmux.
Hope that helps.
Excellent tutorial. I really like byobu inside of terminator — talk about a powerful combination for the power-hungry sysadmin