This is the first release of GNOME Terminal towards to 3.8, and brings a major change. The profiles are now ported to GSettings (bug #624856).
Although there aren’t any other major changes, there are many small improvements with the most important the removal of Close Option from the context menu, that was leading us many time to close terminal by accident.
No Close Option in Context Menu
I have hundreds of time closed Terminal without wanted. I just “Right Click” and Terminal is gone :)
The close option will now be gone in Terminal 3.8. Following the bug (#551284) there is a funny report from Joseph:
I accidentally close the terminal too. I have a sensitive touchpad that occasionally opens the popup. I hit the “l” trying starting to type “ls” and my window is gone before I realize what has happened. It’s been annoying enough change it and compile it myself.
Okay, that was really annoying but re-compiling Terminal just for it, is extreme, yet funny :)
Scroll-back length is now default at 8192 lines
According to bug report (# 624195) a suggestion was that the length of history could be set relative to the RAM, for example:
- If you have 128MB RAM, scrollback could be set to ~500 lines
- If you have 1GB RAM, scrollback could be set to ~10.000 lines
- If you have 16GB RAM, scrollback could be set to ~10.000 lines
The default was 512 lines, but from now on the default scroll-back length -no matter the RAM- will be set at 8192 lines. You can change this anyway from Terminal Settings.
Some Distros are affected from a bug, that even if you change this value you won’t notice any difference.
Speaking of history for the people that don’t know it there is a history command, just give history in a terminal
$ history
You can run a history command by using “!” + the number of history
$ !<history number>
This is specially helpful (and a must in a Console that doesn’t support mouse) if you have a long command because you can search it, and run it
$ history | grep -i "your command" (search for it) $ !<history number> (and run it)
With “!!” you can run the previous command, which is handy if you want to re-run a command with sudo permissions.
$ sudo !!
Or you can use the “-” to run an older command. For example:
$ !-4
Will run the latest 4th command.
Another useful tip is to enable the reverse search by pressing <Ctrl+R>. Anyway there are endless possibilities with bash history, and you can Google around for it.
GNOME Terminal 3.7.0 Changelog
- Terminal now uses GSettings and DConf instead of GConf. The existing profiles and settings will be automatically migrated from GConf when first running this version.
- To make new tabs opened within Terminal have the same same working directory as the current tab, it is necessary for the shell running in the terminal to cooperate. For this, vte installs a bash shell script that you must use in your bash PS1 prompt. For example, you can put this at the end of your ~/.bashrc: export PS1=’\[$(__vte_ps1)\]‘$PS1
- Many bugs fixed
- Many translations updated