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Cerin
Asked: 2016-03-25 12:31:09 +0800 CST

How to change default terminal application in Gnome-Shell

  • 772

Gnome-Terminal is terrible.

It's buggy and whenever Gnome-Shell restarts or resumes from suspend, all Gnome-Terminal windows become unusable and can't be closed. There's an old ticket opened for it, but it'll likely never be fixed.

In the meantime, I've been trying to use other terminal packages. Unfortunately, Gnome-Shell still thinks Gnome-Terminal is what it should use whenever I select "open in terminal" in various menus. If I uninstall Gnome-Terminal, these menus disappear. What's the easiest way to keep the menus, but make my preferred terminal window open instead?

gnome

6 Answers

  1. Or you may simply use: sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

    as per comment; to update it on per user basis check https://serverfault.com/questions/631447/how-to-use-update-alternatives-per-user

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  2. On Ubuntu / LinuxMint to set the terminal emulator app for Nemo's

    • file explorer right-click
    • Ctrl+Alt+T Shortcut

    executing the following allowed me to set terminator as default

    gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec terminator

    Depending on your distro's Desktop/xserver setup and which file explorer you use, you might have to replace org.cinnamon.desktop with org.gnome.desktop or maybe even org.kde.desktop.

    Suggestions can be found by calling gsettings:

    gsettings  list-schemas | egrep -i "desktop"

    For LinuxMint19&Nemo, the cinnamon-variant worked straight away, without even logging out.

    (came from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/336368/how-to-configure-nemos-right-click-open-in-terminal-to-launch-gnome-terminal)

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  3. I wouldn't recommend symlinking another terminal app to gnome-terminal. If any other application in the system is trying to invoke gnome-terminal with specific parameters this might fail. On top of that symlinking might cause issues with package/system upgrade.

    Simply keep your favorite terminal app (terminator/tilda/guake etc) in ubuntu dock/start menu. The other option is to configure nautilus file manager to open your favorite terminal. I presume this is the most likely use case for most people anyway.

    sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal nautilus-actions

    enter image description here Nautilus actions config tool

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  4. Best Answer

    Ideally, there'd be an option under Details->Default Applications, but there's currently no option for "terminal".

    My workaround was to install Terminator, or any other of the many GUI terminal packages which does suffer the gnome-terminal bug, and then symlink it to /usr/bin/gnome-terminal, e.g.

    sudo mv /usr/bin/gnome-terminal /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.bak
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/terminator /usr/bin/gnome-terminal

    The two binaries don't have identical parameters, but so far they seem to be similar enough that all my terminal launchers (nautilus-open-terminal, Eclipse, etc) all seem to pick it up seamlessly.

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  5. I was able to solve this by modifying the GNOME Application in /usr/share/applications/.

    1. Find and open the terminal application. For myself it was located at /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Terminal.desktop
    2. Modify uses of "TryExec" and "Exec" to replace gnome-terminal with your terminal emulator of choice.
    • For this step, if you want interoperability with update-alternatives, you can replace gnome-terminal with x-terminal-emulator. That way, when you use update-alternatives to change the destination of x-terminal-emulator, the application will update automatically.
    1. Restart the terminal

    So far this solution has worked quite well for me. It has the caveat that the application will show up as your terminal of choice, rather than GNOME Terminal, on the dock - you will have to observe what I mean for yourself.

    In my case, I use alacritty. To enable CTRL+N functionality I had to configure alacritty similarly to here.

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  6. You can also use nautilus-python extensions. Just install nautilus-python and save this script as ~/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions/OpenInTerminal.py.

    import os

from gi.repository import Nautilus, GObject

class ColumnExtension(GObject.GObject, Nautilus.MenuProvider):
    def __init__(self):
        pass
    def menu_activate_cb(self, menu, file):
        # Command to run terminal
        os.system("terminator --working-directory=" + file.get_location().get_path())

    def create_menu_item(self):
        return Nautilus.MenuItem(name='TerminatorExtension::Open_Terminator',
                                     label='Open terminal here',
                                     tip='Open terminal in current directory',
                                     icon='')

    def get_background_items(self, window, file):
        item = self.create_menu_item()
        item.connect('activate', self.menu_activate_cb, file)
        return item,

    def get_file_items(self, menu, files):
        if len(files) != 1:
            return
        file = files[0]
        if not file.is_directory():
            return
        item = self.create_menu_item()
        item.connect('activate', self.menu_activate_cb, file)
        return item,
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