Thomas Pain :: blog

Modifying Gnome Terminal settings without a menu

Because why store config data in a file like... literally everybody else??

2022-02-20 :: 82 words


Gnome Terminal stores its configuration data using something called dconf, which is akin to the Windows registry. You cannot manually edit this configuration data, as it's stored in a binary format.

At the time of writing, I know of no other piece of Linux software uses dconf, nor do I know why the Gnome terminal does this.

If you want to edit Gnome Terminal settings as a file instead of through the UI, you need to use the dconf CLI tool.

1dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/ > ~/.gnometerminal
2cat ~/.gnometerminal | dconf load /org/gnome/terminal/