GNOME Terminal (gnome-terminal from the command line or
GNOME's Alt-F2 launcher) emulates the
xterm terminal emulator and provides some of the same features.
Profiles GNOME Terminal supports multiple profiles. A user can create multiple profiles for their account. Users can then set configuration options on a per-profile basis and assign a name to each profile. The available configuration options range from different fonts, different colors, emission of the terminal bell, the behavior of scrolling, and how the terminal handles compatibility with the backspace and delete key. When GNOME Terminal starts, it can be configured to launch the user's default shell or run a custom command. These options can be configured per profile, allowing users to execute different commands depending on the profile. For example, some users may have one profile to launch their default shell, another profile that connects to another computer remotely through
SSH, and finally a profile that opens a
GNU Screen session.
Compatibility GNOME Terminal supports a couple of different compatibility options for interfacing with older software that depends on varying keyboard-to-ASCII assignments. In computing, there has been ambiguity between the backspace key and delete key. When the user presses the backspace key, the computer can either
delete the character before the cursor, or the character at the cursor, which introduces this ambiguity. GNOME Terminal allows the user specify which control character or escape sequence the delete and the backspace keys should generate. As of version 3.12, it also supports RGB direct true colors.
Background GNOME Terminal allows changing background settings on per profile basis. Available options are solid color. Older versions also included
transparent background option, which allowed to see windows beneath terminal window. Although this option was dropped shortly after 3.6 release, several
Linux distributions including
Ubuntu and
Fedora patch their packages of GNOME Terminal to re-enable this feature.
Mouse events Although GNOME Terminal is primarily a command-line interface and uses the keyboard for most input, GNOME Terminal has limited support for mouse events. GNOME Terminal can capture mouse scrolls and both left and right clicks.
URL detection GNOME Terminal parses the output and automatically detects snippets of text that appear to be URLs or email addresses. When a user points to a URL, the text is automatically underlined, indicating that the user may click. Upon clicking, the appropriate application will open to access that resource.
Tabs Multiple terminal sessions may be organized within single GNOME Terminal window as
tabs. Switching between active session is possible either by using keyboard shortcuts or by using tab bar – a row of buttons, each corresponding to active session, that appears on top of GNOME Terminal window when multiple tabs are used. Similar to the profile feature, each tab can be assigned a name.
Safe quit In recent versions, when the user attempts to quit the entire graphical application, GNOME Terminal will prompt the user with a dialog box asking for confirmation. This feature is intended to reduce the risk of accidentally closing a terminal window (e.g., by clicking the window's close button) with a job still running. If a job is running and the user closes the window, the job will quit and the user will have to restart the job if exiting was an accident. This feature is only present when the user closes the application through the graphical interface. If the user attempts to quit with the exit shell command, it is the responsibility of the user's shell to confirm the exit. Although not a GNOME Terminal feature, some shells, e.g.
tcsh and
bash, offer similar functionality and will notify the user that there are stopped jobs. ==Development==