The Ubuntu Incident

On one of my laptops I had problems with the terminal emulators “konsole” and “terminator”. I had tried “gnome-terminal” a long time ago but I didn’t like it. Now I gave it another try and I could make it usable :)

By default, gnome-terminal starts in a little window of dimension 80×25. If you want it maximized, start like this: “gnome-terminal --maximize“.

I made a custom profile but whenever I restarted gnome-terminal, it loaded the default profile. So I removed the custom profile and modified directly the “Default” one under Edit -> Profile Preferences.

General tab
Untick the “Use the system fixed width font” if you want to use larger fonts. Monospace 12 is fine for me.

I don’t like blinking cursors and unfortunately you cannot change it here. To disable blinking, you need a little hacking. Execute the following command in a terminal:

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink" --type boolean "False"

This tip is from here.

Colours tab
I’ve always hated that ugly purple background of gnome-terminal. You can get rid of it by unticking “Use colors from system theme”. I prefer the “Gray on black” built-in scheme. Under “Palettes”, I chose the “Linux console” scheme.

Edit -> Keyboard shortcuts…
Here untick “Enable the menu shortcut key (F10 by default)” and then you won’t have any problems with Midnight Commander. For opening new tabs, I prefer the “CTRL + T” shortcut.