Hello All

OS: CentOS 7 with Gnome GUI.

To enhance my knowledge on Linux, I'm referring Red Hat Online Documentation and the training videos provided by my company to me. I'll be working on RHEL server directly with no GUI in near future. Here is the problem, I've always used gnome-terminal for admin tasks, with all its luxuries like copy/paste, pgup/pgdn, mouse/right click and tabs etc. I tried my hands on console (Ctrl+Alt+F2), and just realised how much its difficult to accomplish my tasks without mouse and tabs. Anyway, I'm practising by using Ctrl+Alt+F1 (for web/video) and Ctrl+Alt+F2 (for console). But its too much pain.

Is there any terminal emulator which emulates exactly like console (very basic), so that I can use Alt+Tab to switch from web page and emulator quickly.

Thanks.

Simplest solution: stop using mouse and tabs...no need to install anything else. Or, boot into runlevel 3, which is NO GUI, and use the console directly...again, no need to install anything else.

To make learning faster, though...consider installing another instance of CentOS in Virtualbox, and set it to only boot to runlevel 3. That way, it's up in a window, with ONLY console access, but you can have web/video up in another to help you follow along.

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Honestly, learn Emacs, or use zsh with vi bindings.

Learning Emacs was the best thing I did for using the shell efficiently; all the same key bindings and much of the same logic apply to both.

To make up for the general lack of modern conveniences that a GUI otherwise provides, you'll also want to use GNU screen, or possibly eshell in Emacs. Both of these give you the ability to "float" your cursor out of the shell, so you can scroll up and down and copy stuff that you need, and give you the option of tabs, and things like that.

My recommended terminal emulator is urxvt; nice and basic, but with unicode support.

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Emacs is far more than a terminal emulator and my experience has been that notklaatu gives good advice, but I've never troubled to learn emacs myself.

I would say it is worthwhile to learn vi/vim. You are liable to run into them installed by default on any distro; the same can't be said for emacs. Vi/vim can seem quite intimidating if you try to learn everything at once, but I've found that, by concentrating on between five and ten basic commands, you can use it quite nicely; then you can learn additional commands as you need them.

If you don't feel up to tackling emacs at this time and if you want to get back to basics, use Xterm or rxvt. (Using them is much easier if you learn how to tweak their configuration with an Xresources file.)

Just my two cents.

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Sorry, I just re-read it and I see that I edited some stuff out of my intended response before posting. I should have been clearer: learning emacs is a good way to learn a lot of useful keyboard bindings, which are also applicable in a shell.

For instance, I used to not know that ctrl-k would cut ("kut") and ctrl-y would paste ("yank") text in a shell, so if I found myself on a text-only console, it was basically impossible for me to copy and paste without gpm. Other little key bindings helped efficiency a lot, too, like ctrl-a for HOME and ctrl-e for END, or ctrl-t to swap two letters, and so on. Learning emacs (or vi and then using vi bindings in your shell) just gets you more efficient in your shell; it has you working smarter, rather than floundering around trying in vain to work around the lack of a mouse.

Thanks TB0ne, notKlaatu and frankbell

I'll go with VirtualBox and Tmux. As for as emacs, i am using vim from past 4-5 years and i'm comfortable with it. I will stick with it.

Thanks

probably:
export TERM=vt100
export TERM=dumb

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Will you please explain what it will do? I ran this in gnome-terminal. Other than arrow keys not working in vim, I don't see any difference.

Thanks

The terminal capabilities depends on the type of the terminal (implementation). The common way to (easily) recognize it is to use the variable TERM. All the terminal emulators will set it to some special value (for example xterm will set it to "xterm") and all the applications using terminals will look for it. Using vt100 and/or dumb means you have a vt100 (a very old one) or a really dumb terminal which has almost no features.
As an example try export TERM=dumb and less /tmp/some/bigger/file and less will report: WARNING: terminal is not fully functional

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OK Thanks.

I found a new way to switch to gui and console very quickly like alt+tab. I realised while in console tty2 (ctrl+alt+f2), when pressed alt+left arrow, it quickly moves to gui (ctrl+alt+f1). But you cannot move from gui to console by pressing alt+right arrow key. So after some google search, i came up with xdotool. I did as shown in screenshot. Now I can move to and fro between gui and console very quickly by pressing alt+right and alt+left.

Attached Thumbnails

 

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I only run Linux so some keys become useless unless my distro or I make a use.

where is the best place to read about those ?

If you have vim installed, it comes with an interactive tutorial. Open a terminal and issue the command, vimtutor. HackerPublicRadio has a good series on vim, Linux Voice has a nice video, and a web\search will turn up lots of stuff.

This is a good intro to xterm: http://scarygliders.net/2011/12/01/c...best-terminal/ There also is an extensive man page. About dot com also has a pretty good introduction.

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