---
title: Modifying Gnome Terminal settings without a menu
description: Because why store config data in a file like... literally everybody else??
publishedDate: 2022-02-20
---
Gnome Terminal stores its configuration data using something called `dconf`, which is akin to the Windows registry. You cannot manually edit this configuration data, as it's stored in a binary format.

At the time of writing, I know of no other piece of Linux software uses `dconf`, nor do I know why the Gnome terminal does this.

If you want to edit Gnome Terminal settings as a file instead of through the UI, you need to use the `dconf` CLI tool.

```bash
dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/ > ~/.gnometerminal
cat ~/.gnometerminal | dconf load /org/gnome/terminal/
```
