How to Customize Linux Terminal

It seems like no matter what distribution you use, the Terminal emulator is the most boring thing. The good thing you can do is make it look a little better with lots of customization options. Here, you will learn how to customize Linux Terminal in a way that gives it a little flair.

Customize Terminal in GNOME

If you use Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop!_OS, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux or SUSE, they all come with the GNOME desktop environment pre-installed with GNOME Terminal. To start customizing this Terminal, click the hamburger menu (three lines in the upper right corner) and click Preferences.

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On the left under Profiles , select Unnamed . The default configuration in the stock GNOME Terminal emulator is always labeled this way.

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The window you navigate to has tabs assigned to Terminal 'themes'. By default, the first tab you access will be Text .

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Customize text

Here you can set up various customization options, such as the size of the Terminal in units that represent the number of blocks of text that fit in columns and rows, or whether you want to swap out flashing blocks. whether the default represents your position in the prompt with something else.

Click the Cursor shape: drop-down menu and select Underline . Now you can navigate back to your Terminal without leaving the preferences screen you opened and check what's changed.

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The underline cursor is less intrusive and is often preferred by people who work a lot with the Linux Terminal. I-Beam is another interesting alternative. Because changes are applied directly, you can experiment with any settings you want here until Terminal matches your preferred text style.

Customize colors

On the Colors tab , you'll find various options that allow you to set the entire color palette that Terminal uses.

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In addition to color settings, you can set a transparent background here by enabling the option and moving the slider to suit your preferences. Lower values ​​in the slider increase opacity.

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If you're not having much luck setting colors or don't want to choose everything yourself, try some of the built-in color schemes available to you in the drop-down menu. You can also set light or dark mode by clicking them there.

Customize scrolling behavior

Although you can ignore this tab, it contains a pretty powerful option: It can make your Terminal look very sleek by removing scroll bars. Remove the check mark next to Show scrollbar and you're done!

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The Limit scrollback to: option controls the number of lines of text you can scroll back in Terminal output. Removing limits can be useful when you want full access to every line of your log when you're doing something very complex.

If you set a limit and choose to stop at a certain point on Terminal's output to read it, it will force you to go over that limit when the line limit is reached.

Command tab

This configuration section allows you to customize how Terminal interacts with your system through its shell. In general, interacting with this menu is not important, especially if you are new to shell scripting.

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The Title section explains its function itself. However, the Initial title setting is something you will never see unless you change what terminal commands can do to the title. The drop-down menu directly below allows you to direct the title.

Run command as a login shell mentions which configuration it will read from. By default, your shell will read information from the .bashrc file in your home directory. Enabling this option will instead attempt to read from .bash_profileor .profilein the same location.

Run a custom command instead of my shell allows you to execute something other than the default shell for your account. This can be another shell such as zsh, fish, sh or dash. Usually, it's better to change the entire default shell so that it opens in every Terminal you ever install on your system. However, if you just want to use an alternative shell in Terminal GNOME, this is the easiest way to do it!

Compatibility tab

This tab is used to change how Terminal behaves with your keyboard input, and in some cases, how it displays output. You can change the behavior of the Backspace and Delete keys. Just note that it will completely change the behavior of Terminal.

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If you get overwhelmed with these options, there's always a reset button below all the other options that allows you to magically restore everything back to the way it was.

Customize Terminal in KDE

If you are using KDE desktop, your system will come with Konsole. Konsole is a highly customizable Terminal, but it won't win any awards for the ease of navigating through its menus.

To customize Konsole, you cannot edit the default configuration. Instead, you have to create a new one, which will automatically copy the settings from the previous one.

Click the hamburger menu on the right side, hover over Settings and click Configure Konsole…

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Navigate to Profiles and click New . This will open the profile editing window where you can adjust your profile as desired.

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Make sure you click Default profile to make any changes to this profile apply to Terminal immediately.

Customize tabs

Since Konsole is a tabbed Terminal emulator (pressing Ctrl + Shift + T will open a new tab), you can customize how tabs display in the Tabs section .

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Hit the Insert drop-down menu to see what you can put in the tab title and experiment with formatting freely.

Customize the interface

Here you will find all the themes you can include in your Terminal. The Get New button allows you to download themes from the KDE community repository. Some pre-installed themes will have both light and dark versions.

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To customize an existing theme, just click the Edit button.

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You can add an interesting effect by checking Blur background and setting the color transparency right below the option.

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In addition to blurring the Terminal's background from anything behind it, the theme editor also lets you set a custom background image with its own level of transparency.

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Customize scrolling behavior

Scrolling menus are very similar to the menus found in GNOME.

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You can hide your scrollbar by selecting Hidden in Scrollbar position . The Scrollback option allows you to set the number of lines of output your Terminal is allowed to retain.

The only real difference from GNOME is that you can specify whether you want to go half-screen or full-screen when pressing Page Down or Page Up .

The Reflow lines when resizing Terminal option will automatically format text in Konsole to fit the screen and break the line to a new line if necessary. Disabling this feature makes Terminal difficult to navigate but can be useful if you only want one output per line.

Samuel Daniel

Update 01 December 2023