Because why store config data in a file like... literally everybody else??
By Thomas Pain
2022-02-20
A few seconds reading time
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.
dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/ > ~/.gnometerminal
cat ~/.gnometerminal | dconf load /org/gnome/terminal/