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red_trumpet
Asked: 2017-10-23 01:44:10 +0800 CST

How to backup GNOME terminal emulator settings?

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I made some custom GNOME-Terminal settings and profiles, and I want to preserve those after reinstalling Ubuntu.

What do I have to save to backup my settings, and how do I reapply them afterwards?

This is not a duplicate of this question, because

  1. Configuration systems changed since the old question, from gconf to dconf.
  2. The other question does not explain how to properly backup, and then reapply the settings.
gnome

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    GNOME Terminal itself doesn't provide such an option, so you have to manually operate on its database.

    Beginning with version 3.8 it uses GSettings, which in turn (at least on Linux systems) uses dconf. It would probably be more elegant to go with the gsettings tool. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to dump all the relevant data there, let alone restore them. So let's use dconf.

    Based on this article, you can dump your settings using:

    dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/ > gnome_terminal_settings_backup.txt

    Reset (wipe out) the settings before loading a new one (probably not really required):

    dconf reset -f /org/gnome/terminal/

    Load the saved settings:

    dconf load /org/gnome/terminal/ < gnome_terminal_settings_backup.txt

    Disclaimer: I haven't tested the restore steps. I recommend that before the reset/load operations you back up your entire dconf database, which is stored in the single file ~/.config/dconf/user, using a simple standard filesystem copy operation (as opposed to some dconf command). In case of problem you can restore it just as easily (maybe from another terminal emulator or the Linux console).

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