How many terminal windows do you usually have open?

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

I'm wondering how many terminal windows my fellow Linux users usually have open?

I find myself with a lot of windows simply because I have one open for every program I have launched. I usually have about 3 for launched programs and 1 for various commands.

Also, is there a way to have multiple programs launched from the same terminal window?

2

You need a terminal multiplexer such as GNU screen.

The number of terminal windows depends on what I'm doing. But I usually have 2-3 for programming, 1 for music, 1 for IRC chat and 1 for bash commands or standard actions / system maintenence.

EDIT: for bash commands you can use job control.

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3

I usually have one for updates and APT crap, one for network troubleshooting and occasionally SSH, and then one for each instance of file manager because its just more pleasant to do some things from the shell

4

I currently have 9 terminal windows open. One of which is remote connected to another server that has 6 SCREEN windows, and one of those is connected to another server with 4 SCREEN windows..... I just checked, two of the Terminal sessions are NOT actively doing something.

This is a slow day.

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5

Usually I manage with only 3-4 of them. Two of those are ssh, one is tilda for basic maintenance and I dynamically open new one for basic text edits. I think the most i ever used was eight

6

Depends...2 to 3 at the most but I'm a novice Linux user, but do use one to ssh into our ubuntu web server, normally one for bash and sometime just let one free wheel running TOP to see what is going on.

7

I need to harden my CLI skills. At home on linux I struggle to keep one going. At work on windows I usually have about 2, one for testing, one for SSH/TELNET.

8

2 on the torrent box
4 on my phone
and last count was 14 for my laptop...

virtual desktops and terminator terminal ftw.

i have no idea what any of them are, my eyes just glaze over and my brain goes into limp mode when i see green on black text now...
haha

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9

Very cool! Each person tailoring their experience to fit their needs. Ahhh, the wonders of Linux.

I also appreciate that everyone is describing what they use their many terminals for as it provides a good source of information for some of the other things that can be done in it. Thanks!

Also, thank you to @spidernet for introducing me to GNU Screen, I look forward to learning more about how to use it and implementing it into my workflow.

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10

4-8 terminals for programming, and usually another extra for a ssh tunnel to my college's server.

11

I'm not a heavy linux user, by that I mean I don't use the terminal for much. However, I generally have 1-3 open on my pc, on the server i have 4-5, one for each minecraft server and one for the teamspeak server(though this now runs as a background task)

12

Heh, yep, 1-2 open at a time for me. I use a lot of GUI software, most commonly CSV files, which would be hell to work with in Vim.

13

I usually have a whole bunch open (6+). Except for browsing the web and reading pdfs, I do all my computing in the terminal. As for launching multiple applications in a single terminal I wrote this function spawn that allows me to launch multiple gui applications from the same terminal without polluting the terminal with tonnes of debugging output. Add it to your ~/.bashrc file, and enjoy spawning all your favourite applications without penalties ^^

function spawn() {
    (exec 0</dev/null 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null "$@")&
}
function _spawn() {
    local cur prev
    cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}
    if [ $(type -t _command)z = "function"z ]; then
        _command # requires bash-completion
    else
# If bash-completion is not installed:
        case "$prev" in
            spawn) COMPREPLY=($(compgen -c -- $cur)) ;;
                *) COMPREPLY=($(compgen -f -- $cur)) ;;
        esac
    fi
}
complete -F _spawn spawn
# Example
$ spawn evince my_document.pdf
$ spawn eog my_picture.png
$ spawn firefox http://forum.teksyndicate.com/
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14

More often than not these days I just fly in and out of Drop Down Terminal for quick commands and maybe open up a couple if I need to run things from the CLI.

You can run programs as a background task and write the debug info to an outfile ... An example of running a .jar as such would be:

nohup java -jar filename.jar &

nohup will tell it to write the debug info to a file named nohup.out, and the & will tell it to run in the background. You can then close the terminal window and the program will continue to run as normal.

15

3

16

For me it largely depended on what I was doing. If I was just browsing the internet, maybe one. If I was doing some system admin / programming, it could be as many as 5.

17

Usually 3, but sometimes even 5.

18

I sometimes have one open when updating or because I need CLI to do some tweak. I had 2 open once, but that was only because the first one was hidden behind a window and I forgot about it.

I don't mind working with the CLI, but usually I just have no real need for it so I don't use it.
The GUIs usually are good enough to use Linux as a regular desktop OS nowadays.

19

I often have too many terminal windows open as I forget about them and tend to open another because it is usually quicker to press Ctrl+Alt+T than it is to find the exact terminal window I want to use.

1 Like