How to change the gnome-terminal default size (ubuntu)

On widescreen LCDs, gnome-terminal looks so tiny. Aren't you sick of resizing it everytime you do a ls -al ?

Here's a good solution to this, and will work with any shortcut icon you may use to start Terminal.

  1. Open Terminal.
  2. Type :
    gksudo gedit /usr/share/vte/termcap/xterm
  3. Enter your password (root password) if necessary.
  4. Find something like that (yours must be different, just look around line 10):
    :co#80:it#8:li#24:\
  5. Change the first and last number, for example to set the default size to 200 columns x 50 lines:
    :co#200:it#8:li#50:\
  6. Save.
  7. Close every Terminal.
  8. Open a new Terminal, Enjoy!

© 2008 - 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

by-sa

11 Comments so far »

  1. Mihail said

    March 11 2009 @ 10:11 am

    Very nice. Thanks ^^

  2. nick said

    April 24 2009 @ 2:24 am

    Thanks! And wow, no wonder I never found that - xterm stuff is black magic..

  3. vincent said

    June 8 2009 @ 6:44 pm

    neat, I used to create a shortcut with geometry param. to set my favorite size, but this just seems the right approach to it !

  4. ntwrkguru said

    June 18 2009 @ 10:44 am

    Very simple and effective tip! Thanks for posting it!

  5. Gary Flores said

    June 25 2009 @ 9:26 am

    This is Excellent, I used the geometry option in the launcher, but Gnome do was obviously not working!!!

    Now IT DOES! Thanks.

  6. pol said

    August 16 2009 @ 1:00 pm

    Sweet. That saved me around 2minutes per day and much more annoyance.

  7. Ryan Edwards said

    November 4 2009 @ 11:22 pm

    Thanks for the tip. Worked like a charm.

  8. Chris said

    November 19 2009 @ 11:10 pm

    This is what I was looking for...I looked in gnomes site, and ubuntu. I even hosed my terminal in the process, had to log in as root to fix. This is the only thing that worked, thx.

  9. FG said

    November 20 2009 @ 4:18 am

    Thanks 4 the tip ;)

  10. jason bourne said

    January 7 2010 @ 7:45 am

    thanks man. worked perfectly :)

  11. sri said

    January 11 2010 @ 1:24 am

    Thank you! Works perfectly in Ubuntu 9.10

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