Installing Terminator messed up Geany's "run" command, what exactly happened?

Support & Help Requests
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I’m running UM 16.04 LTS. Yesterday, I installed Terminator through a PPA. It seemed like a cool terminal so I wanted to keep it and customize it to my liking.

I also use Geany. Today I was running Geany, and the “run” command (the little gears) was broken. Instead of launching my usual terminal, it opened a Terminator window, which promptly complained it couldn’t find a shell. I went and checked my preferences to see what command Geany used to invoke the terminal.

I found the command was x-terminal-emulator -e "/bin/sh %c". Geany reported that %c represented the script it runs to return an exit status from the program. I tried running x-terminal-emulator and it dutifully launched Terminator. I guessed that this was some kind of alias, since it used to invoke mate-terminal and now invoked Terminator. I also guessed that the problem was that Terminator didn’t recognize the “/bin/sh %c”. In the spirit of scientific inquiry I deleted /bin/sh and tried “run” again. Terminator returned an error message that it couldn’t run the script, then X crashed and I had to use CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to recover (!). In retrospect that was a bad idea. :smiley:

I logged back in, recovered my files, and promptly uninstalled Terminator until I could sort out what happened. Apt reported that it was setting x-terminal-emulator to uxterm. Now Geany works again, but it runs uxterm instead of mate-terminal like it used too.

Soooo… what does x-terminal-emulator mean, exactly, why did Terminator hijack it, and what can I do to get set it to point to mate-terminal again? Also, does anyone have an idea why X crashed after messing with Geany’s settings?

I’m going to go read the docs a bit to try to understand what happened and how to fix it in the future, but any advice would be greatly appreciated! I was a little confused that this issue occurred, since both Geany and Terminator are recommended in the Software Boutique for UM.

Edit: Already resolved the issue, learned that x-terminal-emulator is a symlink to the default terminal choice and set it back to mate-terminal. Whew. Now what I want to know is a. why did Terminator reset it to itself without asking and b. what exactly did I do to make X crash? And should I be careful about installing things from PPAs in the future?

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Maybe you can respond to your own reply with the solution and mark it as such?

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Oh yeah, that is a good idea lol. XD Yep I fixed the issue by resetting my symlink. Do you have any guesses why X crashed in this case when Terminator couldn’t run Geany’s run script? It was a little alarming… no harm done though, apparently.

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Actually I feel a bit bad for opening this issue when I was able to resolve it easily enough myself. Sometimes I’m not quite used to how comfortble I’ve gotten with Linux. :slight_smile: I’m able to fix a lot more things than I could before.

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Don’t worry. That’s why we have this forum I guess. :slight_smile: