Drag'n'Drop | The Display | Menu Sections |
If you do View > Show Terminal Emulator or Ctrl-M, a new area will appear near the bottom of the screen, between the panes and the statusbar.
This is the Terminal Emulator, a place where you can type commands such as ls or df -h and have the result displayed.
It also is where are displayed the results of Find, Grep and Locate (see Tools).
Just like a real console, the Terminal Emulator has a prompt. By default this will look something like: david@linux: /home/david $> (especially if you're called 'david').
However this can be configured at Options > Configure 4Pane > Terminals. Changes will take effect the next time the Terminal Emulator is opened.
On the right you will see three buttons with self-explanatory labels. The Cancel button does its best to interrupt a running command, but it doesn't always succeed.
This can be a problem, as the Terminal Emulator isn't as fast as a real console; a command that displays hundreds of thousands of lines will take a long time to finish.
The Terminal Emulator has other disadvantages too:
This is a single-line version of the Terminal Emulator. It is shown/hidden by View > Show Command-line or Ctrl-F6, and is positioned just below the toolbar.
You can use the Command-line in the same sort of way as the Terminal Emulator, but as it's only a single line, any output of a command is shown in the Terminal Emulator.
So why not just use the Terminal Emulator in the first place? Good question. I've no idea why file-managers usually have both; but they do, so presumably someone likes them. If you want it, it's there.
If you run a command in the Terminal Emulator or Command-line, it's executed outside 4Pane; therefore the results can't be Undone and Redone. So don't experiment here with 'rm -f /' ;)