GNOME Terminal

CI status

Releases

Tarballs for newer releases are available from the package registry and new and old release are also available on download.gnome.org.

Source code

To get the source code, use

$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal

Building from source

You will most likely need to also build vte from source; see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/blob/master/README.md .

Start by installing the build dependencies, and a C++ compiler.

For fedora and related distributions, use

sudo dnf build-dep vte291-gtk4 gnome-terminal
sudo dnf install g++

while for debian and related distributions, use

sudo apt-get build-dep libvte-2.91-0 gnome-terminal
sudo apt-get install g++

First build vte according to its own instructions. Then:

$ # Get the source code
$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal
$
$ # Change to the toplevel directory
$ cd gnome-terminal
$
$ # Run the configure script (choose an appropriate path instead of "/some/where"!)
$ # Don't forget to make sure that pkg-config can find your self-build vte!
$ # e.g. by doing:
$ # export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/some/where/lib64/pkg-config:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
$ #
$ # If you compiled gnome-shell into the same prefix, you can omit disabling
$ # the search provider.
$ #
$ meson _build --prefix=/some/where -Dsearch_provider=false
$
$ # Build
$ ninja -C _build
$
$ # Install
$ ninja -C _build install

• By default, GNOME Terminal will install under /usr/local, which is not usually the right choice. You can customize the prefix directory by --prefix option, e.g. if you want to install GNOME-TERMINAL under ~/foobar, you should run meson _build --prefix=$HOME/foobar. If you already run the configure script before, you should also pass --reconfigure option to it.

• You may need to execute ninja -C _build install as root (i.e. sudo ninja -C _build install) if installing to system directories. Use a user-writable directory as --prefix instead to avoid that.

• Since GNOME Terminal uses a D-Bus activated server, you cannot simply run the self-built gnome-terminal directly. Instead, you need to start the new gnome-terminal-server directly using

$ ./_build/src/gnome-terminal-server --app-id test.Terminal &

and then you have 10s time to open a window in that server using

$ ./_build/src/gnome-terminal --app-id test.Terminal

Also see https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/Debugging for more information.

Debugging

After installing GNOME-TERMINAL with -Ddbg=true flag, you can use GNOME_TERMINAL_DEBUG variable to control GNOME-TERMINAL to print out the debug information

$ GNOME_TERMINAL_DEBUG=selection ./_build/src/gnome-terminal-server [...]

# Or, you can mixup with multiple logging level
$ GNOME_TERMINAL_DEBUG=selection,draw,cell ./_build/src/gnome-terminal-server [...]

$ Or, you can use `all` to print out all logging message
$ GNOME_TERMINAL_DEBUG=all ./_build/src/gnome-terminal-server [...]

For logging level information, please refer to enum TerminalDebugFlags.

Contributing

Bugs should be filed here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/issues/ Please note that this is a bug tracker to be used for developers of GNOME Terminal, and contributors of code, documentation, and translations to GNOME Terminal, and not a support forum.

If you are an end user, always file bugs in your distribution's bug tracker, or use their support forums.

If you want to provide a patch, please attach them to an issue in GNOME GitLab, in the format output by the git format-patch command.