I’ll admit that my daily work does not revolve around containerization (the process of packaging software code with all the required libraries and dependencies in order to perfectly run on any infrastructure).
Nevertheless, when I heard about Ptyxis, a terminal for containers (and no, I’m not referring to containers and terminals found in ports), I actually got a bit excited.
What exactly is a terminal for containers or a terminal for a “container-oriented desktop”? To keep it as short as possible, it’s a Terminal app (for GNOME, mostly) that’s specifically designed for users/developers who work with a lot of container technologies such as Podman, Toolbox, or Distrobox.
The first thing that makes Ptyxis a really interesting app is, of course, its existence. The whole concept behind it (which can be found on the project’s official GitLab repo) is rather amazing.
Secondly, I like the idea of specialized apps meant to make the work of others a lot more comfortable and faster. The features are definitely what make Ptyxis a rather good app.
Let’s start with the basics. This is a Flatpak-specific app (or Flatpak’able, as the dev calls it), which means that it should work flawlessly on any Flatpak-enabled system (also thanks to the specialized ptyxis-agent, but more on that a bit later).
In terms of container support, you get native “user session” (yes, even if it’s a Flatpak app), Podman, Toolbox, and Distrobox support, as well as JHBuild support.
Another aspect that makes Ptyxis interesting and worth your while is its GUI (sounds a bit odd saying that about a Terminal app, right?). The app remembers current container when opening a new tab (the app also boasts a nice GTK4 tabbed GUI, making multi-tasking a lot smoother), configurable keyboard shortcuts, and user-installable color palettes.
Ptyxis also offers support for preferences profiles with container integration, efficient foreground process tracking (sudo and SSH), support for transparent terminal backgrounds, a grouping option for the terminal tabs (separate cgroups), pinned tabs, saved sessions, and a terminal inspector.
I mentioned that ptyxis-agent is at the heart of the app. This “agent” manages PTY and PID tracking, as well as does all the container monitoring work. It communicates with the UI via a D-Bus serialization (over a P2P socketpair ()).
The ptyxis-agent is created on the host-system very similar to executing a new shell. The whole functionality of the app is also very closely tied to your host system’s support for GLib. If, for example, you system is a bit older, and does not support GLibc, the app will fallback to running ptyxis-agent in the Flatpak sandbox which, naturally, will restrict some features.
Even though containerization is not a subject I’m true and true passionate about, I do find the whole concept to be very engaging. That’s exactly why I appreciate what Ptyxis is trying to do here.
If you’re a Linux user and your work even remotely involves containers, it would be a shame not to at least try it out for a bit.
