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<img src="http://parcom.pro-networks.org/PROneT-News/News2/news.gif" align="right" alt="Double your fun with QuadKonsole">Double your fun with QuadKonsole
September 21, 2006 (08:01 AM GMT)
By Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier

Sometimes it's the simple ideas that produce powerful applications -- like a terminal emulator that provides several shells side by side in a single window. A few days ago, I was looking for a way to split windows in Konsole when I ran across QuadKonsole, a program that embeds several Konsole instances in a single window, making it easy to switch between shell sessions and keep an eye on all of them at once.

Most of the time, Konsole's tabbed interface is fine -- I can switch back and forth between shells and only need to concentrate on one session at a time. However, sometimes I want to be able to eyeball two or more sessions at once, and trying to toggle two Konsole instances just doesn't cut it. QuadKonsole, on the other hand, makes it easy to juggle two, four, or more sessions simultaneously.

QuadKonsole is available from Simon Perreault's homepage as source code, or you can find Ubuntu packages for QuadKonsole on pkg.marisil.org. Using QuadKonsole. The default is for QuadKonsole to start up with four Konsoles -- two columns and two rows. If you'd like to override this, QuadKonsole has --columns and --rows options. For instance, to start QuadKonsole with just two Konsoles split vertically, run quadkonsole --rows 1. To start QuadKonsole with two Konsoles split horizontally, run quadkonsole --columns 1 instead.

I'm not sure what the upper limit is for QuadKonsole, but it does start to get silly once you have more than eight Konsoles. QuadKonsole also defaults to focus follows mouse -- so if you move the mouse pointer into one of QuadKonsole's panes, that cursor becomes active. This is old-school Unix behavior, and some users might prefer to use a mouse click to activate the cursor rather than just moving the pointer.

<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/source.jpg"> Linux.com
<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/view.jpg" border="0"> <a href="http://applications.linux.com/applications/06/09/15/1858220.shtml?tid=13" target="_blank"> complete article</a>