A terminal multiple window manager

You can’t use the mouse or run multiple windows in a text environment… unless you’re Shashank Sharma and know just the right tool for the job.

- Shashank Sharma

Terminal emulators and a text environment are quite different. For one, you don’t have the luxury of using a mouse on a text environment, and you can’t run launch multiple windows. Try one of your virtual terminals by pressing Alt+Ctrl+F1. The subject of this tutorial is Twin, which enables you to launch multiple windows in a text environment.

Twin (Textmode WINdow environment) is a window environment with mouse support and features a window manager and terminal emulator. It’s different from tmux, which enables you to split your terminal into different panes and perform a variety of different tasks in each. In a nutshell, Twin is no different than having multiple windows open simultaneously on a graphical desktop environment.

For those of you who worked with DOS, back in the 80s, and before the release of Windows, DESQview was quite a rage for a brief period of time. Users were able to run multiple windows at the same time. Twin brings the same functionality to your Linux distributions.

Getting started

You won’t find Twin in the software repositories of Linux distributions. This means that you must install it by compiling its source. First, there are a number of packages that you must install to ensure that Twin runs smoothly. Thankfully, all of its requirements can be installed using the software management tool on most modern desktop distributions.

You need to install the x11-dev, ncruses-dev, zlib-dev. xpm-dev and gpm-dev packages. The exact name of the package will vary depending on your distribution. For instance, on Ubuntu, you can install these packages with the following command:

sudo apt install libx11-dev libxpm-dev libncurses-dev zlib1g-dev gpm libgpm-dev