How to force Terminator to reload configuration on the fly

As Gilles says, you'll need to use a tool that knows about the format of your config files. For your particular example, you can use a short Python script that uses the built-in ConfigParser module.

• First, let's say your original configuration file on the server is original.cfg:

  [config]
  ip=127.0.0.1
  port=22
  

• Now put your changes in a new file called update.cfg:

  [config]
  user=root
  

  This file should have new or changed entries listed under the section heading where you would like them to go.

• Then run a script like this one:

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  
  import ConfigParser
  
  config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
  
  # Read the original config file
  with open('original.cfg', 'r') as f:
      config.readfp(f)
  
  # Also read in all the changes we'd like to make
  with open('update.cfg', 'r') as f:
      config.readfp(f)
  
  # Write the full new config file out
  with open('output.cfg', 'w') as f:
      config.write(f)
  

There are, of course, plenty of variations on how to do this. For example, the config changes could be coded directly into the Python script rather than read from a separate update.cfg file. This should give you a good base to get started, though.

Terminator doesn't support this. In fact, Terminator, such as many other terminal emulators (e.g. gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, mate-terminal, roxterm, sakura, tilda...) uses the VTE widget for terminal emulation and the VTE widget does not support this.

You might want to take a look at how fonts are defined, and whether you can take an existing font and create a new one by adding some more space at the top and bottom. I don't know how to do this.

You might also want to take a look at fontconfig, the library responsible for locating the desired font. It might have such a feature, I don't know.

Or you can easily build a modified VTE for yourself, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738781. Make sure to first find out the exact version of VTE your Terminator is using, which in case of Terminator version <= 1.0 will probably be vte-0.28.2 and start off from that version (or upgrade to Terminator 1.90 and go for vte-0.fourty-whatever).

Update:

VTE implemented this feature in version 0.52. This makes super easy for Terminator (or any other VTE-based terminal emulator) to add support for this. If you still care, please file a feature request against Terminator.