I’m new to Linux; I fled from Windows in the wake of 10-11 ever-accelerating stream of bullshit.
Anyway, I have major muscle memory for MRU window and tab switching with alt-tab and ctrl-tab. Edit for clarity: I also want to be able to navigate to the Nth most recent tab by holding Ctrl and pressing Tab N times, then releasing Ctrl. I use it all the time to switch windows, switch browser tabs, and switch IDE tabs. In Windows, I could also switch Terminal tabs in MRU order, and I miss this in Linux. My distro (Mint) comes with gnome-terminal, which as far as I can tell doesn’t expose MRU switching as an option.
Is there an alternative terminal that does support this, ideally with ctrl-tab? Alternatively, if you use MRU switching in other contexts but not in your terminal, what do you use instead?
UPDATE
After installing many different terminals and poring through documentation of widely varying quality, I have found at least two terminal emulators that just do what I want, out of the box: Konsole and QTerminal. I’ll dive deeper into the relative merits of these two for now. If you know of another terminal that does what I described, or any crucial info about either Konsole or QTerminal, please let me know!
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I guess MRU means Most Recently Used.
Please include explanations for abbreviations you mention.
MRU means Most Recently Used. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I think tmux should be able to do that.
Thanks, I’ve heard of tmux but have never used it before. I took a quick look at the Getting Started guide, and it sounds like I could get behavior like what I want by e.g. creating two windows each with one full-window pane and toggle back and forth between windows? I will definitely look into this further.
Yes, something like that.
You’ll get other fun features for free, like
- the ability to reattach the session over SSH, after starting it locally
- immunity to Xorg / Wayland compositor / terminal emulator crashing
- ability to comfily use non-tabbed terminal emulators like Alacritty. At least I think it’s not tabbed…
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OK, this sounds close to what I want, but I left one part unsaid: my muscle memory is such that if I want to visit the 2nd most recent tab, I can hold Ctrl, press Tab twice, then release Ctrl. It doesn’t sound like I can accomplish this with tmux key bindings, or can I?
I dunno, but it sounds like you’d end up back in the original, rather :|
Kitty has been my daily driver for quite some time now, I really like it for its rich feature set and extensive configuration.
You can use its
goto_tabaction with 0 and negative values to get MRU behaviour. See more here: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/actions/#action-goto_tabOK, this sounds close to what I want, but I left one part unsaid: my muscle memory is such that if I want to visit the 2nd most recent tab, I can hold Ctrl, press Tab twice, then release Ctrl. It doesn’t sound like I can accomplish this with Kitty key bindings, or can I?
Just tested* and it doesn’t seem to work, no. I don’t know if it’s doable though, it may be.
- Even though I’m a heavy user of that behaviour in Firefox (which now has to be explicitly turned on :/), I’ve gotten used to just use the left and right arrows (+kitty mod bind) to move around tabs.
Thanks, I’m open to learning alternative workflows, so thanks for adding that info.
Glad to hear! Good luck :)
I’ve read your update but try Terminator. You use alt + arrow keys to navigate multiple on screen terminals, create new ones with ctrl+e/o and its my favourite. I highly recommend giving it a try!
Thanks, I did try Terminator, but it didn’t seem to have the kind of C-Tab MRU tab switching I was after. BTW, it looks like the two I did find also support multi-pane terminals with arrow key navigation. Thanks for taking the time to reply!
All goof, enjoy your alternatives!
Not sure about the specific requirement but here you can find a list of “modern” terminal emulators to look at
Z
Thanks for the link! There are lots of lists of terminals out there, but it’s really hard for me to judge the quality of the lists.
