Open a new tab in terminal instead of a new window?

Question

When a terminal is running and I launch another, is there any way to open a new tab in the same window instead of open a new window?

Answer 1

pantheon-terminal actually has an undocumented command line option -w with which you can specify a working directory for the new terminal.
This option also handily checks for already existing pantheon-terminal windows and opens a new tab if there is one, or a new window if there isn't.

I've written a tiny script that simply uses that option and then focuses the terminal with wmctrl:

#!/bin/sh

pantheon-terminal -w ''
# A small sleep might be useful if the terminal doesn't open fast enough for wmctrl to focus it
#sleep 0.05
wmctrl -ia $(wmctrl -lx | sed -n 's/^\(0x[0-9a-f]\{8\}\)\s\{1,2\}[0-9-]\+ pantheon-terminal\.Pantheon-terminal .*$/\1/p' | tail -n1)

The script depends on the wmctrl package.

It will open the new tab in the last opened terminal window. If you'd rather like it opened in the first opened window, check the history of my answer for an older version of the script with that behaviour.

I saved the script to /opt/open-terminal.sh and made it executable with
chmod +x /opt/open-terminal.sh

I've mapped the script to the <Super>+T key combination so that I can easily open a new terminal whenever and wherever:

                         

If you want that behaviour whenever you click on the Terminal shortcut, you could probably simply change the Exec parameter to the script.

This command wil make a copy of the pantheon-terminal shortcut for your user and set it to execute the script:

sed '/^\[Desktop Entry\]$/,/^Exec=pantheon-terminal$/{s#Exec=pantheon-terminal$#Exec=/opt/open-terminal.sh#}' /usr/share/applications/pantheon-terminal.desktop > ~/.local/share/applications/pantheon-terminal.desktop

---

elementaryOS Loki (v0.4):

As pointer out by @cipricus in the comments, it seems that with pantheon-terminal v4.0+ (Loki and above), they changed the behaviour of the -w option to also automatically focus the temrinal window.
So if you are on Loki, you only have to add:

pantheon-terminal -w ''

as the command in the custom keyboard shortcuts and the desktop shortcut.

Here's the command to create a copy of the desktop shortcut with only the pantehon-terminal -w command:

sed '/^\[Desktop Entry\]$/,/^Exec=pantheon-terminal$/{s#Exec=pantheon-terminal$#Exec=pantheon-terminal -w ""#}' /usr/share/applications/pantheon-terminal.desktop > ~/.local/share/applications/pantheon-terminal.desktop

Answer 2

Keyboard Shortcut is

Ctrl+Shift+T

More elementary tutorials found at WebCheerz

Answer 3

The default terminal in Elementary OS offers the possibility to open a new tab. On the left side of the terminal you'll find a plus which opens a new tab in the same window.

Answer 4

This is a complement (tested in Loki) to the other answer that shows that a good command is

pantheon-terminal -w ''

The command pantheon-terminal -w %u is present in the file usr/share/applications/open-pantheon-terminal-here.desktop. The `''´ part is needed in that some character has to be used there, but anything can go, like a dot, or even a poetry line

pantheon-terminal -w 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

This command can be used to replace the default one in usr/share/applications/org.pantheon.terminal.desktop (the default desktop file of the terminal), or in a new desktop file to be kept in dock, etc.; also, the default Super-T can be reassigned to this command, or a new shortcut can be created for this command in Keyboard > Custom > Add.

Answer 5

This will set the default new tab's path to that of the previous tab

gsettings set org.pantheon.terminal.settings follow-last-tab true