Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, FinalTerm is an open-source and powerful terminal emulator written in Vala, bringing many out of the box features.
In this article I demo the main features and show you how to install FinalTerm 1.0 on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Pinguy OS 14.04, LXLE 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Linux Lite 2.0, Peppermint Five and Debian 8 Jessie.
What I don’t like about FinalTerm:
It does not have copy/paste support. When you right click inside the terminal, no copy/paste is displayed and the keyboard shortcuts did not work also. I had to write the link in a text file and do wget $(cat textfile) to be able to download what i needed.
I had issues with scrolling up in the manpages.
However, Final Term is under massive development so most likely new features will be added and bugs will be squashed. Despite the fact it is not stable, it really behaves well. Don’t be too judgemental, or at least not yet.
Interesting features:
Good repositioning of text after window resizing.
Command completion: The terminal emulator keeps track of all your previous commands and suggests you commands from the history. Also, it sorts the commands so that the one you need will be right at the top.
The terminal understands what is happening in the shell and recognizes PIDs, web URLs or IP adresses and so, it is capable of providing relevant commands.
Finalterm is also easily customizable, allowing the users to create key bindings. For example if you create this key binding: L = RUN_SHELL_COMMAND “ls -lh” , each time you will be pressing Ctrl + L, ls -lh will be called. Also, the users can set key bindings globally (for everybody that uses FinalTerm on that system).
It recognizes the “ASCII ar scrollbars” [=====> and displays scrollbars of a matching GUI, for popular commands like wget.
Also, it has support for 256 terminal colors and supports 24-bit RGB terminal colors, which can be customized via color schemes.
Similar to Guake, it can be configured to get dropped down from the top of the screen and folded up again, by pressing a key which is configured by the user.
Installation instructions
Because FinalTerm is not available via any PPA or repository for Ubuntu 14.04, Debian Jessie and derivatives, we have to build it from sources, from Git. Follow the instructions exactly, in order to get a successful installation.
$ sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake intltool valac libgtk-3-dev intltool clutter-gtk-1.0 libkeybinder-3.0-dev libgee-0.8-dev libnotify-bin libmx-dev
$ git clone https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm.git
$ cd finalterm/
$ mkdir build
$ cd build/
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ sudo make install
Optinal, to remove finalterm, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove finalterm