Getting involved — Terminator 1.0 alpha documentation

# Getting involved

There are many ways to help out, and they don’t all involve coding.

## Translations

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Awesome! I’ve been getting my head around the whole translation bit (English monoglot I’m afraid), and as a result there has been a lot of churn in the translations. So what are you waiting for?

Speak some other language? Take a look at https://translations.launchpad.net/terminator because you might just be the <insert language here> speaker that we’re looking for.

## Improve icons/artwork

OK, so while the main icon contributed by Cory Kontros is really good, my hacks of it are... not so good. I’m no artist, but I do appreciate them. So if you think you could apply some polish and a cohesive design to this manuals page header images, please, give it a go. It may only be to take the existing icon and to make it suck less.

The only thing I would ask is that you maintain the main icon as a base like I have done.

## Terminator action shots

This one’s just for “PR” purposes. I want to see famous/awesome people kicking ass and chewing bubble-gum with Terminator in the mix.

If you spot it in a TV show, movie, or a news article I want to know. Maybe you’re even the famous/awesome person, in which case drop me a note.

It will warm the cockles of my heart to know that Terminator made life easier for people who do the really important stuff like discovering new particles (CERN? Hello?), boldly going (NASA? Come in Houston), or wrangle 2 more frames per second from Half-Life 3 (Valve? Confirmed?)

Here’s the ones I’ve spotted and noted (I’ve seen quite a few others previously, but never thought to note them)

- MindMaze - VR / mind-reading.

    Visible in the background of the video, and in an image lower down the page. (The Verge)

## Manual updates

This manual is a new endeavour to fully document all the nooks and crannies of Terminator. As such, there may be things that are missing, incorrect, not explained clearly, or need expanding.

Suggestions, or updates are welcome.

I had a little exposure at work to Sphinx, so I thought I’d dig in a bit deeper and learn a bit about it. So far I’m happy enough, so till further notice this manual will remain in this format.

If you’re feeling like a loquacious polyglot you could attempt to translate the whole manual. So far I haven’t tested it, but in principle, just do a checkout of the trunk, and do a full copy of the `doc/manual` folder to `doc/manual_XXXX` where XXXX is the i18n language code. This is usually just the two or three letters of the language code, but sometimes has the region too... Or something else entirely in a couple of cases. A couple of examples:

    pt            - Portugese
    pt_BR         - Brazilian Portugese
    ca            - Catalan
    ca@valencia   - Catalan (Dialect specific to Valencia?)

Then just translate away, and take new screen grabs to replace the British English ones I’ve done. If someone was to make a serious effort to translate the manual, I’m sure we can get it included.

The Help shortcut checks the LANGUAGE environment variable, and tries those folders in order, before falling back gracefully to the default manual, which is British English anyway:

    LANGUAGE=en_GB:en

So this is going to try:

- html_en_GB - the non-existent British English folder
- html_en - the non-existent generic English folder
- html - the default document that happens to be in British English

Note

Although the source is in a folder beginning with `manual`, that gets replaced with `html` for installation.

Note

If there are any Americans offended by correct spelling, they are more than welcome to create an Americanised version, and I’ll relegate it to the en_US folder. The default will remain British English.

In order to create the html for the manual, you must have the sphinx_rtd_theme package installed. This does not appear to be packaged for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as far as I can tell. This means you must install it using the pip tool. This may need installing on your system too with:

    sudo apt-get install python-pip

Once that is installed you can install the theme with:

    sudo pip install sphinx-rtd-theme

This will take care of installing the theme and it’s dependencies.

Warning

On Ubuntu this also installed a newer version of Sphinx under the `/usr/local` folder. This caused a bit of confusion at one point, so be aware.

## Testing

Just use it, explore the features, and complain when they don’t work.

We actually have quite a lots of outstanding issues, and in many cases I can’t reproduce due to either lack of info, differences in environment, lack of information, or because the bug is so old the original raiser has moved on and not available for questions.

I’m particularly interested in cases where I can’t even see that something is an issue, such as:

- Right-to-Left - I can force Terminator to Arabic, and everything flips around, but I have no idea if it looks “right” to a native speaker. Frankly it just looks weird!
- HighContrast - Again, I can switch to it, but perhaps I’m not appreciating the needs of that group.
- Accessibility - People using only a keyboard, or only a mouse, on-screen keyboards, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and so on.

## Bugs

- Fixing - OK, so yeah, this is coding.
- Reproduce and improving - Sometimes bugs are lacking info to reproduce, or my system is too different. Or perhaps the original poster has moved on because we haven’t fixed their pet peeve fast enough.
- Triaging - It’s one of the less glamorous jobs, but someone’s gotta do it. Shepherd bugs to the point where it has a priority, a milestone, reproduction steps, confirmation, submitted patches validated, and so on.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator

## Plugins

Ahem... Yeah... More coding...

Some Plugins may have room for improvement, or perhaps you have an idea for a neat plugin no-one else has done.

## Main Application Development

Oh come on... Coding? Again!

I see lots of people say how Terminator is really good, and it is, but like anything, it could be better!

To give an idea, as I write this manual in July 2015, there are 83 wishlist items.

Note

Just because an item is marked as wishlist, it doesn’t mean that a great deal of thought has been put into the appropriateness of the idea on my side. It may be impossible, or not a good fit, or just plain bat-sh!t crazy. If you want to pick up a wishlist item that looks like a lot of work (especially if it makes fundamental changes to the Terminator ethos) it’s probably best to check first that your approach is good, and has a realistic chance of being merged.

Some of these wishlist items are also in my own text file of “Things to do” / “Big bag of crazy”, which as of August 2015, revision 1598, looks like this:

    Enhancements which may or may not have a wishlist item
    ======================================================
    Completely new features
        Add libunity quicklist of saved layouts
            https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/LauncherAPI#Python_Example
            http://www.techques.com/question/24-64436/Refreshing-of-Dynamic-Quicklist-doesn%27t-work-after-initialization
            http://people.canonical.com/~dpm/api/devel/GIR/python/Unity-3.0.html
            Possibly use the progress bar and or counter for something too.
        Add an appindicator menu for launching sessions.

    Layouts
        Layout Launcher
            Could bind the shortcut as a global toggle to hide show
            Could save
                window position/size
                hidden status
                always on top
                pin to visible workspace
        Layout needs to save/load more settings
            Per layout?
                Group mode status (all, group, off)
                Split to this group
                Autoclean groups
            Per window
                always on top
                pin to visible workspace
            Per tab
            Per terminal
                Store the custom command and working directory when we load a layout, so making small changes and saving doesn't lose everything.
                It could be possible to detect the current command and working directory with psutil, but could be tricky. (i.e. do we ignore bash?)
        A per layout "save on exit" option to always remember last setup/positions etc. Probably requires above to be done first.

    Missing shortcuts:
        Just shortcut:
            Context menu (in addition to Windows menu button - not always available on all keyboards)
            Group menu
            Open preferences
            Change tab text (#1054300-patch), titlebar text, group name
            Toggle titlebar visibility
            Equalise the splitters (siblings/siblings+children/siblings+parents,all)
            Zoom +receiver in/out/reset
            Zoom all in/out/reset
        New code:
            Open a shortcut help overlay (Ctrl-F1?)
            Insert tab text, titlebar text, group name value into terminal(s)
            Last terminal / tab / window(again to jump back to original) #1440049
            Limit broadcast group/all to current tab / window (toggle)
            Broadcast temporarily off when maximised or zoomed to single term (toggle)

    Titlebar
        Add large action/status icons for when titlebar is bigger.
        Improve the look/spacing of the titlebar, i.e. the spacing around/between elements

    Tabs
        right-click menu replicating GNOME-Terminals (move left/right, close, rename)

    Menus
        Add acellerators (i.e. "Shift+Ctr+O") might look too cluttered.

    Preferences
        Profiles
            Add preselection to the profile tab
        Layouts
            Have changing widgets depending on what is selected in the tree
            Terminal title editable
            Button in prefs to duplicate a layout
            Ordering in list
        Keybindings
            Add a list of the default keybindings to the Preferences -> Keybindings window?
        Option for close_button_on_tab in prefs. (needs tab right-click menu first
        Option to rebalance siblings on a split (don't think children or ancestors make sense)
        Figure out how to get the tree view to jump to selected row for prefseditor

    Config file
        Items should be sorted for saving. Easier for comparing and spotting changes.

    Plugins
        Give plugins ability to register shortcuts
        Custom Commands is blocking, perhaps make non-blocking

    Drag and Drop
        Terminal without target opens new window
        Tab to different/new window depending on target

    Major architectural
        Improve DBus interface, add coordination between sessions, i.e.:
            multiple DBus ports? register them with a master DBus session, be able to query these, etc
            be able to drive them more with command line commands, and not just from within own shell
            Remotinator improvements
        Abstract out the session/layout allowing multiple logical layouts in the same process to reduce resource used
            This is a big piece of work, as a lot of the Terminator class would need seperating out.
        Hide window should find the last focussed window and hide that. Second hit unhides and focusses it
            Add a power hide to hide all of shortcut bound instances windows
            Use the dbus if available to hide the current active window, then unhide it on second shortcut press
            If the dbus is available:
                The hide will go to the focussed instance, instead of the first to grab the shortcut
                Add a super power hide to hide all Terminator windows
                In both cases a second shortcut unhides whatever was hidden

    Split with command / Inherit command/workdir/groups etc

    Somehow make Layout Launcher, Preferences, & poss. Custom Commands singleton/borg (possibly use dbus)

    When in zoomed/maximised mode
        Perhaps the menu could contain a quick switch sub menu, rather than having to Restore, right-click, maximise
        Shortcuts for next/prev,up/down/left/right, etc. How should they behave

    All non main windows to be changed to glade files

    For me the two different sets of next/prev shortcuts are a bit of a mystery.

    Let window title = terminal titlebar - perhaps other combos. Some kind of %T %G %W substitution?

    If we can figure out how to do arbritrary highlighting, perhaps we can get a "highlight differences" mode like used to exist in ClusTerm.
        This could also be limted to highlighting diffs between those in the same group.

    Issues encountered where not aware of any LP bug
    ================================================

    BUG: Zoom and maximise do not work if single terminal in a tab, gtk2 & gtk3. Intentional?

    BUG: Zoom on a split non-maximised window on just one terminal causes window size changes if zoomed terminal font is
         bigger that the non-zoomed window.

    BUG: Groups: Create two tabs with splits. Super+G (group all), move to other tab and Super+T (group tabs), move back and type
        Output in tab group too. Also for custom groups.
        Ungrouping all also nukes changed groups. Right?
        Also with Super+T and changing one terms group, still receives input, and loses custom group when turning off tab group.

    BUG: Hide on lose focus broken. LP#843674
        focus-out signal callback defers (idle_add) the call to hide.
        If one of our own windows/menus pops up, an inhibit flag is set.
        When the window/menu is closed we call a deferred hide on the main window
        In the deferred function, we check if we now have focus, and do not hide
        In the deferred function, we check if inhibit is set and do not hide
        Could create a popup_menu subclass that sets the inhibiter

So as you can see, still lots of room for improvements, and plenty of ideas if you are trying to find small starter tasks.

## GTK3 Port

Last coding one, I promise!

After some sterling work by Egmont Koblinger, one of the VTE developers, he came up with a very large patch for rudimentary GTK3 support. A number of things were incomplete or broken, but it got it far enough along that it was no longer an insurmountable cliff face.

Since then I have resolved to port fixes and features between the two versions. As I do this I explore and find outstanding issues with the port, and it is slowly becoming more usable.

Eventually the GTK2 version of Terminator will go into a deprecated/maintenance mode. Unfortunately due to needing a relatively new version of libvte, that switch will not be in the immediate future. I’m running trusty (14.04 LTS) and even there I had to build libvte 0.38 from source. This makes the GTK3 out of reach for the “Joe Bloggs” of the world. I could try and maintain my own PPA of the component, but that doesn’t help Fedora/OpenSUSE/Arch etc. users. Even getting “Joe Bloggs” to add a PPA can be a struggle.

And for a real nightmare, I tried to compile the 0.40 version and the thing lit up with a smorgasbord of items where my installed packages were not new enough.

If you are feeling brave and adventurous, there are some instructions in comment #15 of the porting bug that will help you get the GTK3 version running. Assistance knocking off the remaining rough edges will be very much appreciated.

For the record, as of August 2015, with the gtk3 branch at revision 1577, these are the outstanding items:

    Outstanding GTK3 tasks/items/reviews etc remaining
    ===================================================
    Outstanding trunk revisions: 1599-1602 (minus manual, that comes later), 1613-1615, 1617
    If titlebar text wider than window, the visual bell icon does not appear
    If editing label in titlebar, the whole layout gets distorted until finished, then snaps back to mostly correct layout
    In High contrast mode the titlebar background only works over the group button
    In High contrast mode the titles are invisible for terminals with a group
    Fix/reimplement the DBUS for GTK3. GI seems incomplete with no Server. Try to get old style working again.
    Need to go through all the Gtk.STOCK_* items and remove. Deprecated.
    Homogeneous_tabbar removed? Why?
    Need to set the version requirements - how? needed?
    terminal.py:on_vte_size_allocate, check for self.vte.window missing. Consequences?
    terminal.py:understand diff in args between old fork and new spawn of bash. Consequences?
    VERIFY(8)/FIXME(7) FOR GTK3 items to be dealt with

    For future with vte0.40+ - reimplement/restore the word_chars stuff.

    Not fixable so far as I can see
    ===============================
    [Function N/A in 0.38+, will it return?] visible_bell - removed and not mentioned. Check capability not possible, or can be faked.

Once the GTK3 port is done there is also a long overdue port to Python3, especially in light of some distributions trying to eliminate Python2 from the base installs. Yes, Python2 will be with us for a long time yet, but this should serve as a warning.

## Terminator API Docs

Strictly speaking this isn’t an API as such, because it is just using sphinx-apidoc over the Terminator code base. It’s perhaps helpful to have this as a document that can be browsed.

Terminator API docs

As it stands, this is rather incomplete, or too terse with no examples given. If you look at the terminatorlib.configobj package, you will see fairly extensive documentation, along with walk-throughs, etc. This particular package was written elsewhere, and brought into Terminator to provide configuration handling.

There are also some aspects of the way this document builds that I’m not too happy about. The seemingly unnecessary `terminatorlib` root-node in the side bar; the lack of class/method links in the sidebar; all `.py` files on the same page (this can be changed, but then even less is displayed in the sidebar.) If you can help, join the A-Team... Or better yet, send me some changes that fix this.

## Other Docs for Developers

Here is a list of some useful sets of documentation:

General
Python | https://docs.python.org/release/2.7/index.html
GNOME Dev. Center | https://developer.gnome.org/
Bazaar DVCS | http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/en/
GTK 2
PyGTK | https://developer.gnome.org/pygtk/stable/
VTE for GTK 2 | https://developer.gnome.org/vte/0.28/
GTK 3
GObject Introspection | https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GObjectIntrospection
GObject | https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/stable/
PyGObject Introspection | https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/PyGObject
PyGObject | https://developer.gnome.org/pygobject/stable/
Many PIGO autodocs | http://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/
GDK3 Ref. Manual | https://developer.gnome.org/gdk3/stable/
GTK3 Ref. Manual | https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/index.html
Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial | http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
VTE for GTK 3 | https://developer.gnome.org/vte/0.38/