I have covered the gnome-terminal in a few ways (see my articles “Make gnome-terminal profiles work for you” and “Get to know Linux: gnome-terminal“.) These articles either is an introduction or deals with a specific aspect of the tool. This time around, I want to highlight a few different tips and tricks that can help to make gnome-terminal even more useful and user-friendly.

Change that title

When you open up gnome-terminal you usually will see the hostname and the current working directory. Sometimes this just isn’t much help. This is especially true when you have more than one terminal window open and you want to make sure you know which terminal you are working in. You can change this by clicking Terminal > Set Title. After you click this a small window will open where you can type the new terminal title. Once you save that title your gnome-terminal will display the configured title until you close and re-open the tool (upon reopening the title will revert to the default.)

Search the contents of an open file

The gnome-terminal tool includes it’s own search feature. With an open file you can search that file with a string by clicking Search a new window will appear where you can enter the conditions for your search. Those conditions are:

• Search for: This is the string you want to search for in your file.
• Mach case.
• Match entire word only.
• Match as regular expression.
• Search backwards.
• Wrap around.

This is a great way to help you work with larger configuration files such as smb.conf or httpd.conf.

Zoom in/out

There are reasons for zoom in and out. The biggest reason is accessibility. For those with vision impairments, zooming into the terminal window is a quick way to make the text in terminal large enough to see. To zoom use the following key combinations:

• Zoom in: Ctrl++
• Zoom out: Ctrl--

If you have trouble with the key combinations, click View > Zoom In or View > Zoom Out to control the zoom.

Switch dimensions

I’m not talking about switching from 2D to 3D (or d20). I’m talking about the size of your terminal. There are four pre-configured sizes you can easily switch to (for different usage.) If you click the Terminal menu entry you will see, near the bottom of the menu:

• 80×24
• 80×43
• 132×24
• 132×43

You can easily switch to one of those sizes by clicking on the size you want. When you open the terminal, it will open back to the default size.

Final thoughts

There you have just a fraction of the tips and tricks that can be pulled off with gnome-terminal. There are plenty more where that come from and we will re-visit this topic. Until then, enjoy the CLI!

The gnome-terminal comes pre-installed with any GNOME desktop installation, so if you’re running GNOME you won’t have to do any further installation. You might, however, want to undertake some configuration changes. We’ll examine some of those options here.

Default gnome-terminal Window

When you start up the gnome-terminal you will be greeted by the default profile with a single tab open.

The default features you will notice immediately are the menu bar and the scroll bar. Outside of the bash prompt, the menu bar will be where you take care of most of your gnome-terminal business. Let’s examine what you will find in each menu entry:

File: In this menu entry you can open/close a new tab, open/close a new terminal, and/or create a new profile.

Edit: In this menu entry you can copy/paste, edit your profiles, and/or configure keyboard shortcuts.

View: In this menu entry you can configure gnome-terminal to show/hide the menubar, and/or the scrollbar or you can zoom in or out.

Terminal: In this menu entry you can change your profile, change your window title, set character encoding, reset your terminal, and/or reset and clear your terminal.

Tabs: In this menu entry you can cycle through your open tabs and/or detach a tab (so it is its own window).

Help: In this menu entry you can open up the GNOME Help system to learn about gnome-terminal and you can open the “about gnome-terminal” window.

That’s it for the tabs.

As I mentioned, the gnome-terminal is fairly configurable. You can make this terminal as minimal as you like. You can remove the scrollbar and the menubar if you like. To do this click on the View menu and de-select both the scrollbar and the menubar. What that leaves you with is nothing more than a terminal prompt in a window. Or does it? If you right click anywhere in the gnome-terminal window a menu will appear. From that menu you can select to, once again, show the menubar. Once the menubar is back you can then select to show the scrollbar.

Profiles

One of the nicest aspects of the gnome-terminal is that you can create profiles. Each profile can reflect, say, a different job. Say you want to have a root user profile. This can make for an easy way to instantly know you are using the root user (so you don’t commit any command-line fouls that could damage your system). To create a new profile click on File and then select New Profile.  What you will see is a small window asking you to name the new profile and base the new profile on a pre-existing profile.

Once the new profile is named the main Profile editor window will appear where you can really tweak your profile. There are six tabs within the Profile editor:

General: Configure the general options such as name, font, show menubar, terminal bell.

Title and Command: Give this profile an initial title and run custom commands (such as automatically listing directory contents when a profile is opened.)

Colors: Foreground and background colors.

Background: Configure a background image or window transparency.

Scrolling: Place the scroll bar and define how far back it will scroll.

Compatibility: Configure the backspace and delete keys.

Final thoughts

I have used many terminals in my day, but the gnome-terminal is one of the finest. Not only is it very compatible, it is useful and user-friendly. If you use the GNOME desktop (or an alternative desktop), make sure you get to know gnome-terminal for all your command line goodness.