How to open multiple instances of the bash Terminal?

Question

Under Ubuntu 10 I could easily open as many Terminal instances as I needed, and I often need 6 or more. How can I do that in Ubuntu 12? When are they going to fix the bug that restricts me to only one?

Answer 1

There is absolutely nothing in Ubuntu that restricts you to opening only one terminal window. At the moment I have anout 30 terminal windows open :)

Answer 2

Difference between Gnome 2 and the "new" Unity

I think you are referring to the behavior of the panel on the left side of screen which is now similar to a mac. When you click on an icon, the application is started. If, however, the application is running already, you will switch to its window.

For users of good old Gnome 2, this may be irritating. There, starters were for starting applications. No matter how often you click them and no matter what is already running, they start a new window. Switching between windows was done via a separate panel which lists all running application.

In Unity, the panel takes over both tasks. Launching and switching to applications. It assumes that the typical use case is to have one instance of an application open and maybe use its built-in tab support.

Multiple Windows in Unity

However, there is a possibility to open multiple windows by using just the mouse. Just right click on the element and select New Terminal. A more convenient way involving also the keyboard is holding Shift and left clicking on the application icon. A third possibility to start the terminal (which is the one I prefer) is using the shorcut Ctrl+Alt+T.

Choose what you like most.

As you can see, its not a bug, its just a big change on the user interface.

Answer 3

bash is just the shell. You can open as many as you like. Terminal on the other hand is the application that emulates a terminal.

So there are several ways.

The text way:

Ctrl+Alt+F1 -Ctrl+Alt+F6 (by deafult)

The old school way

Using screen or bashes background job support More info

Or in gnome

Which is what I suspect you want. Just lauch gnome terminal several times. There's the File-> New Terminal option, and if all else fails you can always start several terminals from terminal.

gnome-terminal --window --window --window --window --window --window

which will spawn 6 new terminal windows.

I do not know of a bug that restricts you to one terminal. I frequently use 4 or more for rails development.

• Spork
• Autotest
• Guard (long story)
• The Rails console

If you need a more in depth example my autotest script runs (please excuse the poor formating the site did):

!/bin/bash
source /home/coteyr/.bash_profile

gnome-terminal --working-directory="$1" --profile=rails --tab --title="DRB" --command=/home/coteyr/.bin/spork.sh --tab --title="Testing" --command=/home/coteyr/.bin/auto-test.sh --tab --title="Reload" --command=/home/coteyr/.bin/reload.sh