Terminator should take an argument to specify structure on startup

[Emmet Hikory]

Binary package hint: terminator

Terminator should provide some command-line options to specify a startup layout for the given instantiation. An example of such usage would be to have some preferred default configuration launch at session startup, to be followed by the more traditional model of session-modified ad-hoc layouts during use. Another example of such usage would be to allow the user to combine with -e to create shortcuts for various preferred usages (IDE, log analyser, mailreader. multiple IRC client, etc.).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jun 15 22:13:23 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: terminator 0.12-2
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.30-8.9-generic
SourcePackage: terminator
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-8-generic i686

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

I absolutely want us to get to configurable layouts, but I'm a little concerned about doing it, even initially, via command line arguments.
My concerns are twofold:

 1) It might be hard to drop it later when we have better configurability
 2) It seems exceptionally hard to specify the correct nesting via the commandline. If I give three -e's, should the first terminal split three times, or the second term split the first one and the third split the second? It might seem like a trivial question, but subtle differences can have a dramatic difference in what you can do with the arrangement later.

[doobiest (launchpad-doobiest)]

I would like to revive this as this is a feature I have been hoping for for some time and since this is the only bug/feature request I can find on it, and based on how dated it is, I'm assuming I will never see this feature.

Here are some thoughts

1) Terminator should have the ability to remember the split layout and reload it on startup.
2) Terminator should be able to specify a profile (not a gnome term profile) from the commandline which allows different split layouts upon startup.
3) If you're familiar with the ratpoison window manager, which is really a lot like the experience in terminator, there is a config file for specifying the layout of the tiles. You basicallly spawn splits and specify the ratio.

example:

tile1 vsplit 60/40

This then creates two tiles, one 60% one 40% The 40% one is then named tile2

tile2 hsplit 50/50.. now you have tile3. etc.

Then something like this to execute what we want in each tile.

tile3 exec tail /var/log/something.