Two terminator panes sharing a session simultaneously?

[Tommi Tuura]

Hi, I have a feature in my mind which I'd really love to see in a graphical (windowed) terminal emulator.

First off, this might be a bit "far out" feature, and I'm not sure if its feasible or even if there are any people besides me who'd want it. Here goes, anyway. Feel free to throw this out or put it in the "far future if someone feels like doing it" category. I'd actually just like to hear people's opinions, honestly.

I'd like to be able to have two terminator panes "share" the same terminal in a way that would allow me to view double or triple the lines of single terminal simultaneously on a widescreen display. The lines not visible on the first pane should be drawn to the next, and so on. Kind of analoguous the a word processor program's (like libreoffice) showing two pages side-by-side.

Obviously it should be completely transparent to the program running within, so these panes would be restricted to the same column width (changing the width of one would force the change to other panes sharing the same terminal) to make sure termcap would still describe a rectangle of columns x lines as is expected.

The point would be that the lines should flow automatically through the panes, so if I'm running vim (for example) and adding lines to the beginning of a file, the rest of visible lines in other panes would automatically flow downwards too. Or running ls -la would just run through the panes and show me as many files simultaneously as it can, without up/down scrolling. (which also should be visible in all panes simultaneously)

Again, the analogue I'm trying to catch is the two-page view in word processor.

My motivation for asking this kind of feature is that many people have widescreen displays which mean they have lots of horizontal pixels but not so much vertical. Also, some displays do not have pivoting feature (most prominently laptop displays), and even then some of the cheaper panels do not give very nice look at text when in portrait orientation. I'd love to get as many lines of code visible at the same time, without scrolling around, even at the price of sacrificing the ability to see long lines.

I understand this might be very hard to implement, especially given that I understand terminator is built upon gnome-term. So I'd like to at least ask, do you think this feature would even be useful to have, or am I dreaming up something completely stupid?

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

I'll set this to a wishlist item, but as you say it's a strange one, and would be very hard to implement. With the low activity level I wouldn't hold your breath.

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

As a suggestion, you could look at http://subdivi.de/~helmut/tcvt/ which seems to do what you want.

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

Just to record some thinking on this for future possibilities.
If we were using Qt I think this would be possible using a single QGraphicsScene containing the console widget, and multiple QGraphicsView's.
Gtk doesn't seem to have something like this, but used with clutter it *may* be possible using the similar sounding Stage, Viewport and Actors.
At least in Precise there's no working python/gtk/clutter bindings, so if this were get looked at at some point, it would be unlikely till after moving to Gtk3 via GIR (where clutter is also accessible through GIR.)

The thinking is to create a Stage/Scene ~1/cols * width and cols * height, and then have cols*View each showing the appropriate 1/col slice, i.e. cols =3

p1
p2
p3

becomes

vp1|vp2|vp3

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

Well, in Qt getting a test script together to test the concept was ridiculously easy in a few dozen lines... And it works, allowing a single widget split across multiple views... And QGraphicsScene and QGraphicsView are very very cool! If only GTK was as powerful :-(