[SOLVED] Where does XFCE Terminal store its color scheme?

Miranden · 05-28-2013, 09:33 AM

I know this is probably a simple question, but I have done quite a bit of searching and cannot find the answer. Most of the sources I've found about terminal color schemes assume everyone already knows how to apply them.

What happened to me is that I was playing around with -current, and I finally had the perfect color scheme in my XFCE Terminal. I adjusted it with the little colored squares in the program menu.

Then I was having some problems with -current and decided to go back to stable, and I copied my user's home folder to a flash drive so that I would be able to find all my settings in there if I needed to. Then I reinstalled Slackware. However, now I cannot find where the color scheme is stored. Some sources have mentioned an .Xresources file, but I don't have this file.

Can anyone tell me where this information is? Thanks.

Philip Lacroix · 05-28-2013, 10:03 AM

All settings for XFCE's Terminal should be here:

Code:

~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc

or here, for system-wide settings:

Code:

/etc/xdg/Terminal/terminalrc

The file and its directory are created when you change some settings using the GUI interface, so you probably don't have them on your fresh installation. If none is there, Terminal uses the default settings.

Kind regards,
Philip

kikinovak · 05-28-2013, 10:33 AM

Slackware 14.0 ships with Xfce Terminal 0.4.8. I upgraded it to 0.6.1, because the new version has some nice new features, among which predefined color schemes like Gnome Terminal. If you're interested, I have a SlackBuild in my repo.

https://github.com/kikinovak/desktop...ource/Terminal

Cheers,

Niki

Miranden · 05-28-2013, 11:31 AM

Thank you both for that information. I will file this in the important section of my personal Slackware notes! And I will make use of that Slackbuild.

Unfortunately, I checked, and I do not think I got the relevant files when I made my backup. I think I may have made a mistake when I thought I had changed it in my personal home folder. There is no ~/.config/Terminal/ directory in my home folder, so I think I must have made the changes inhe root account, and I forgot to copy the hidden files out of the root folder.

It looks like my perfect color scheme is gone.

Oh well. I'll do better next time.

Ahau · 05-28-2013, 12:50 PM

When version 0.60 was released, "Terminal" was renamed to "xfce4-terminal", and the config file for it was changed from ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc. Check and see if you have a file in this new location and, if so, try copying it to the old location. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you can try to manually migrate the specific settings from the config file for the newer version back to the config file for the older version you're using now.

EDIT - also, save a copy of the config file in the old location before you copy the new one in there, just in case it causes some kind of failure. In my experience, the config files for these versions are interchangeable, but I've not done a lot of customization.

Philip Lacroix · 05-28-2013, 01:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ahau

When version 0.60 was released, "Terminal" was renamed to "xfce4-terminal", and the config file for it was changed from ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc.

That's right. I was looking in the source package of version 0.6.2 and found this in the updated man page (slightly edited):

Quote:

ENVIRONMENT

xfce4-terminal uses the Basedir Specification as defined on Freedesktop.org to locate its data and configuration files. This means that file locations will be specified as a path relative to the directories described in the specification.

${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}

The first base directory to look for configuration files. By default this is set to ~/.config/.

${XDG_CONFIG_DIRS}

A colon separated list of base directories that contain configuration data. By default the application will look in ${sysconfdir}/xdg/. The value of ${sysconfdir} depends on how the program was build and will often be /etc/ for binary packages.

${XDG_DATA_HOME}

The root for all user-specific data files. By default this is set to ~/.local/share/.

${XDG_DATA_DIRS}

A set of preference ordered base directories relative to which data files should be searched in addition to the ${XDG_DATA_HOME} base directory. The directories should be separated with a colon.

FILES

This is the location of the configuration file that includes the preferences which control the look and feel of xfce4-terminal.

${XDG_CONFIG_DIRS}/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc

This is the location of the configuration file that includes the preferences which control the look and feel of xfce4-terminal.

Miranden · 05-28-2013, 04:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ahau

When version 0.60 was released, "Terminal" was renamed to "xfce4-terminal", and the config file for it was changed from ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc to ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc. Check and see if you have a file in this new location and, if so, try copying it to the old location. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you can try to manually migrate the specific settings from the config file for the newer version back to the config file for the older version you're using now.

EDIT - also, save a copy of the config file in the old location before you copy the new one in there, just in case it causes some kind of failure. In my experience, the config files for these versions are interchangeable, but I've not done a lot of customization.

Thanks. I checked ~/.config/xfce4/terminal/terminalrc, and there is nothing there either. I must have made the changes in root.

However, I looked to see which location it would be in in my new Slackware 14 installation (since I made some changes to the colors there too in an effort to reproduce my old palette), and I do indeed have a ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc which shows all the colors I changed. So I guess they are still putting the information in the old location.