Terminal tabs addicts are being catered for in the next release of GNOME’s Console app.

Console (known as ‘KGX’ or ‘Kings Cross Station’ during early stages of development) replaced GNOME Terminal as terminal emulator in GNOME 42. Built in GTK4/libadwaita, Console is a good-looking and well-featured terminal emulator that also works great on mobile.

But one issue it, like other terminal apps, has is that tab titles aren’t particularly descriptive. This isn’t much of an issue when you only have a few open, but when you’re a bunch of CLI-based work (or using neat CLI apps like I do) it’s hard to know which tab is doing what.

Enter the new tab overview feature in Console, coming as part of GNOME 44 this spring.

Console’s tab overview speeds-up switching between terminal tabs by giving you a top-level look at all your open tabs and running process. Like a bird to a worm, you can spot the one you need and click on it (or select it with the keyboard) to swoop in and interact.

Should the tab you want not be open — it happens — there’s a large “new tab” button at the bottom (very touch-friendly) so you can launch a new session to do what you need.

As well as as menu entry you can enter overview mode in Console by pressing the shift + ctrl + o keyboard shortcut.

In all, an excellent enhancement to this enigmatic new terminal emulator because, as you can see in the image above, it’s very hard to distinguish tabs in this app without switching to them.

You can install GNOME Console on most Linux distros from the default repositories.

However, to install the latest version of GNOME Console with the overview feature mentioned here, you’ll need to be using wait until the GNOME 44 release in March, or toy with a distro in development like Ubuntu 23.04 or Fedora 38 Rawhide.