How do I get Terminator to start up with my custom layout?

1. After setting up your layout, right-click on any terminal background and choose Preferences → Layouts tab and click on Add button.

2. Give it a name and hit Close.

3. This should create the mentioned ~/.config/terminator/config file.

4. Now you can start terminator using the saved layout using: terminator -l yourLayout (replace yourLayout with whatever you chose on step 2).

5. (optional) Edit the ~/.config/terminator/config file so that where it says [layouts] and nested below it [[yourLayout]], rename yourLayout to default and remove/rename the previous default layout. Now, when Terminator starts without any parameters, it will load your custom [[default]] layout!

There is a very easy way to accomplish this:

• Open Terminator
• Right click -> Preferences
• In the Layouts tab (to the right of the Profiles tab), edit the default one, you will see that it says Window | window0 and Terminal | child1.
• For the Terminal | child1, you can set: a Profile (to choose from the installed ones), a Default command, and a Working directory.
• Set it/them to whatever you like, close, reopen again...
• ... and voilá!

Hope this helped!

I use the method mhnagaoka suggested, but I made it usable from the launcher in Unity. I also had an issue with plain terminator -l my_default command, so specify these additional flags

• -b for borderless and
• -m for maximized.

The final Command is terminator -m -b -l my_default.

Now you need to modify terminator.desktop entry for Unity.

Go to your application folder, in my case it was /usr/share/applications. You need to have root permissions to edit with your text editor terminator.desktop.

In my case it was, sudo vim terminator.desktop.

Replace the Exec argument with your Command.

Now you can add the entry to your Unity Launcher, and it should always open your custom layout on the start.

After saving your layout (as per mhnagaoka's answer), you can make your changes used by default by editing the config file.

Edit the ~/.config/terminator/config file and look for where it says [layouts]. It should look something like this:

[layouts]
  [[default]]
    # ..default layout
  [[yourLayout]]
    # ..your custom layout

Rename [[yourLayout]] to [[default]] and remove/rename the previous default layout. Now, when Terminator starts without any parameters, it will load your custom default layout!