The goal of the project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals.

Terminator packages exist for Arch,[2] Debian/Ubuntu,[3] Fedora,[4] OpenSUSE,[5] Gentoo,[6] Snap,[7] FreeBSD,[8] OpenBSD.

[10] Terminator is not a fork of GNOME Terminal (which is written in C); instead, it was developed from scratch by Chris Jones, entirely in Python (based on PyGObject to interact with the desktop environment and Python VTE providing the GUI component), but much of the behavior of Terminator is based on GNOME Terminal.

In July 2013, Steve Boddy succeeded Jones and took the lead of the project.

In April 2020 the project was forked to GitHub due to a lack of activity on Launchpad.