I do most of my development work (bash, ipython, vim) in a terminal. Some of it involves working remotely on other machines, and demonstrating things for others (e.g., pair programming). I need different setups for each of these. I spend most of my time hacking away in a local shell, so for that I want optimized font, color, size, etc. Then when I share I need to make the font way bigger. And when I’m on a different machine I like to have a different color window (in addition to a custom prompt color) so I don’t forget where I am. So those are the three basic tweaks that are critical for most people. You can probably make those tweaks with most xterm-clones.

I’ll assume you’re using GNOME already. You can get a feel for the gnome-terminal feature set by simply firing up an instance: Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. But I suggest you right-click it instead, and “Add this launcher to Panel“. In fact, do that a few times; we’ll customize each differently.

Now from an open instance, you can explore the options by invoking:

$ gnome-terminal –help

Profiles

There are profiles. Create a few. This is pretty important. If you’ve only got a “Default” profile, every time you change it, you’ll affect every other open window.

Font

I’m very picky about having the tiniest font that will work. I can actually look at 380 lines of code at a time on a humble (1920×1200) 15″ laptop screen. To achieve this I have to go with a non-antialiased (bitmap?) font. The generically named “Monospace-7″ is not beautiful, but works well for optimizing screen real estate. It’s also the only bitmap font I’ve seen that renders italic/oblique well.

Monospace is also the only font I’ve seen able to scale down to 6-point and render readably. Try it — pretty amazing! I can now look at 570 lines of code (if I cheat and narrow the last window a bit) in 15″! I’ve got great near vision, but I have to be really close to the screen to read it at 6, so I’ll go back to 7. You could also easily install other more appealing bitmap fonts like Terminus (apt-get install xfonts-terminus). In fact, terminus at 8-point fits the same number of characters as Monospace at 7-point. Too bad Terminus doesn’t do 6!

Remember to stop all running gnome-terminal instances to get a new font to show up in the list.

CLI Options

Customize the CLI options with right-click, Properties. Look at the Command field and start adding options there. The first I like to add is –geometry=80×50 to set the window size; the default of 80×25 is always too small. I like to start out with a meager 80 columns to make it obvious when I’m exceeding the good old rule.  Of course I often widen manually if I’m not in code.

Automatic Remote Login

My favorite trick is to automate logging in to remote machines. It’s as simple as adding another option: –execute ssh YOU@SOMEHOST