I use terminal emulators daily on my main machine and my go-to has always been GNOME Terminal however, that is until I found a new program called “Black Box”!
This is a short article to shed some light on the new contender as I believe it’s worth checking out if you’re on a GTK/GNOME-based desktop environment.
I am a long-time GNOME user as I’ve had a soft-spot to how things work and have been loving the keyboard-centric workflow. I also really enjoy KDE Plasma and other desktop environments however, GNOME has always had a special place in my heart due to how things work. While there are a lot of things that need improving in the GNOME world, the terminal has always been adequate for my needs but seeing how other
Terminal Padding
As GNOME Terminal is a GTK 3 application, I would place the following CSS file into my ~/.config/gtk-3.0/
and it would give me some aesthetic terminal padding.
/* gtk.css
* Add padding to terminal.
* Place this into the "~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css" file
*/
VteTerminal,
TerminalScreen,
vte-terminal {
padding: 10px;
-VteTerminal-inner-border: 10px;
}
While this doesn’t add anything from a functionality stand-point, it does make the terminal a nicer place to be in. However, there are other appearance related things that are a bit lacking (e.g. coloured CSD/titlebar, seamless scrollbar). These are just purely cosmetic but if I was to spend many hours in the terminal, why not have something nice to look at? 🙂
Black Box vs GNOME Terminal
Here is a quick look at the difference between Black Box and GNOME Terminal.
![](https://tekbyte.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-from-2024-01-11-13-21-15.png)
![](https://tekbyte.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-from-2024-01-11-13-21-46.png)
On the left, you can see Black Box which can be themed very easily and also colour’s the CSD (i.e. titlebar), similar to what iTerm 2 looks like on Mac. 🙂
As for GNOME Terminal, it still looks very good however, the plethora of options available in Black Box is a bit nicer.
Here is a quick look at some of the settings it offers:
![](https://tekbyte.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Screenshot-from-2024-01-11-13-25-19-872x1024.png)
It should be available on most distribution repositories but if not, you can always download it from Flathub as a Flatpak.
That’s all for now. 🙂