Alternatives to LXterminal

Yes, if you install the Mate desktop, you'll get the Mate terminal. I've never had the problems you describe with tabs, and it as a search within the buffer option from the menu.

The Mate desktop is slightly heavier on resources than LXDE, but can be handled easily by the Pi 2 or 3. There are lots of other things that make it far nicer to use than LXDE or the other extreme light weights.

---druck

There are lots:

Requires QTermWidget which requires qtbase >= 5.4 when Raspbian Jessie repo only has 5.3. So, no go?

I didn't want to change the whole desktop (which works very well) but only the terminal emulator. However, Mate looks interesting and might be worth trying, at least.

Thank you!

bob prohaska

How does one download and try them? I tried sudo apt-get install xfce

and a couple of others, none were found...

The system is bob@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a Linux raspberrypi 4.4.50-v7+ #970 SMP Mon Feb 20 19:18:29 GMT 2017 armv7l GNU/Linux

Thanks!

bob prohaska

xfce isn't a terminal program. I cant try this (no raspbian) but apt-cache search terminal may provide hits with candidates for your installation Ron M.

MATE is I think built over Gnome and GTK toolsets so terminals that come with it may need a lot of baggage installed first.

Personally I think MATE is the best of the bunch for my way of working, which isn't to say its to everyone else's needs.

Bit if you like a vaguely XP-ish appearance and look and feel, sans the utter crap that comes with Microsoft, MATE provides it.

It looks like if you want MATE the easiest thing is to reinstall with it

As others have said, XFCE is a desktop.

Its terminal is in the xfce4-terminal package in Fedora distros, so may be worth a look as it works quite well though its quite basic: its only real extension (which I never use) is that it can have multiple tabs in its window. This adds an extra tab menu bar to the window for switching between tabe, each of which occupies the whole window.

I have no idea what other support packages it would drag in since I just install a Fedora XFCE spin which includes everything the desktop and terminal need.

Thanks very much for the clarification; I was utterly confused on that point.

It seems as if the feature I'm looking for (search of the scrollback buffer) isn't to be had without major alteration to the LXDE environment that comes with Raspbian. That does not seem worthwhile, at least not now.

Thanks to everybody for enlightening me!

bob prohaska

My first guess was that this might be a feature of the shell, not the terminal, but I couldn't find anything in bash or zsh. But it would be possible running screen in the terminal and search it's scrollback buffer.

Then I've just googled it:

Some terminals support ctrl+shift+f to search in the buffer. I've just tried xfce-terminal and it works.

Installing that terminal should be as easy as sudo apt-get install xfce4-terminal ... at least it is on ubuntu

Once you have installed another desktop, you can mix and match components such as file managers. That's a small upside to the annoyance of then having two of everything in the menus! You can of course either edit the menus or un-install the old desktop.

---druck

Yeah no, it searches in both input and output, so the whole scrollback buffer, as if it was all one plain text document. (Which I guess *could* still be the shell, but terminal much simpler.) Pretty handy sometimes.

I'm a pretty big fan of sakura, which is a smallish binary with few dependencies. I see the rest of this conversation turned into recommendation for an alternative desktop. That's fine if you want big change, but you can get an alternative terminal without doing so. As terminals go, sakura does most of what you want, but not Ctl-F find. There's also rxvt-unicode in the raspbian package repository.

Roxterm might be your best bet. That does even the control-F find thing. I've just discovered it myself. Seems lightweight, and you can have it without bringing in a whole new desktop.

Have fun.

screen is a good option here, if you close the terminal the session remains open, also good if you want to leave a long running process unattended.

add screen -xRR to .bashrc & it will be automatically run & log into the previous session if open each time you SSH to your PI.

I line terminator as a terminal but I am not sure about the ability to check the "scrollback" in the GUI itself have you checked out the History command?

tmux is a better bet these days. Actually supports unicode, for example.

It finally dawned on me that I was center-clicking on the tab. That seems to kill the tab unconditionally. I suppose that makes it a wetware bug, not software 8-)

Thanks very much! I've installed both and will experiment.

bob prohaska

History won't do what find will do. I want to look for things _other_ than commands I've issued, such as error messages in response to my commands.

Thanks for replying!

bob prohaska