A gnome-terminal replacement

Browsing the Open Compositing forums a few months back I discovered a new terminal that has been developed called stjerm. Stjerm, in the authors own words, is a “simple quake-like terminal”. Stjerm drops and hides with the press of a key so to provide nice unobtrusive access to a terminal.

Stjerm is lightweight - the download is 24k and has few dependencies. Matthias Jansen, thank you, has created an ebuild for it that can be grabbed at bugzilla.

To store setting for stjerm, stjerm uses the ~/.Xdefaults file. The man page describes all the settings. I put them here so people don’t have to repeat the process:

~/.Xdefaults
# ~/.Xdefaults - stjerm-0.11
stjerm.key: f12
#stjerm.mod: control # shift, control, alt, windows, none (*)
#stjerm.keymod:
stjerm.autohide: true # true (*)
#stjerm.font: Terminus 9
#stjerm.font: Liberation Mono 11
#stjerm.font: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 10
stjerm.font: Monospace 10
stjerm.background: black # black(*)
stjerm.foreground: gray
stjerm.allbold: false # true (*) - isn’t working
stjerm.border: none # thin, thick, none (*)
stjerm.opacity: 50 # range: 10 - 100
#stjerm.bgimage: # background image
sjterm.width: 5 # in pixels, isn’t working
stjerm.height: 300
stjerm.position: top # top(*), bottom, left, right
#stjerm.scrollbar: right # left, right, none(*)
#stjerm.shell: # X shell to use
stjerm.lines: 2400 # 1000 (*)
stjerm.showtab: one # never, one, always
stjerm.tabpos: top # top, bottom(*), left, right
#stjerm.tablable: # The terminal number gets appended, term(*)
stjerm.tabfill: false # tab spans window? true(*)
stjerm.scroll: true # automatic scrolling, true (*)
#stjerm.colorX: # specify a 16 color palette

Command Line Settings

Because there are a few bugs a few items will need to be entered with the command line.

I discovered that stjerm autohide function found me pressing the shortcut key often to unhide it, so I use “stjerm -ah false so to be able to manually toggle it.

The colors settings will also need to be set with the command line option until the .Xdefaults option is fixed.

Enter the colors starting with color0 and define to color16 - color 16 is a bug but is need for it to recognize the colors. Heres the colors I use:
stjerm -ah false -c0 2e3436 -c1 cc0000 -c2 68926b -c3 C4a000 -c4 3465a4 -c5 75507b -c6 06989a -c7 d3d7cf -c8 555753 -c9 cc0c0c -c10 67CF00 -c11 fce94f -c12 89aed6 -c13 ad7Fa8 -c14 34e2e2 -c15 eeeeec -c16 2e3436

The colors can be selected by using the gnome-terminal settings dialog:

Shortcuts

Here are the shortcuts to help navigate stjerm:
new tab: ctrl-shift t
close tab: ctrl-shift w
next tab: ctrl-shift pageup
previous tab: ctrl-shift pagedown
exit: ctrl-shift q

Final Thought

Using the terminal is beautiful. The only thing I miss from gnome-terminal is web page recognition support - links have to be copy and pasted. Hopefully this is an application that will continue to be developed.