GNOME Terminal

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GNOME Terminal

The Gnome terminal running under Ubuntu 6.10.
Developer:	GNOME developers
Latest release:	2.16.1 / 2 October 2006
Preview release:	2.17.92 / 27 February 2007
OS:	Unix-like
Use:	Terminal Emulator
License:	GPL
Website:	directory.fsf.org/gnome-terminal

GNOME terminal, also identified as gnome-terminal, is a terminal emulator written by Havoc Pennington and others. It is part of the free software GNOME desktop software suite. This allows users of GNOME to execute commands using a real UNIX shell whilst still remaining on their graphical desktop. Along with this comes the benefits of being able to move the window, resize it and shift it to another desktop, just like any other window in GNOME.

GNOME Terminal is very similar to the xterm terminal emulator, and has a nearly identical feature set. Some of the more important features of the two include their support for coloured text (the output of a command such as ls --color=auto shows the use of this feature well), and support for mouse events within the window. Mouse events are commonly used within ncurses based applications for using menus or buttons that normally would have been selected using the keyboard. The application aptitude makes use of this feature. GNOME Terminal, as xterm, emulates almost completely the VT102 DEC terminal, along with a series of extensions accessed through escape sequences. Newer versions support compositing and real transparency.

Much of GNOME Terminal's functionality is provided by the VTE widget [1].