I am running Linux Mint on a laptop with a wide screen and high resolution. It has been annoying me that when I start a GNOME terminal it start with the default terminal size of 80×24, which just does not work with my high resolution. The scripts that I am running has rather long logging information, which line wraps and makes it hard to read. Every time I start a terminal the first thing I would do was change the size of the window with the mouse. Not very efficient. I looked through the profile settings and found a setting to change the default terminal size, but it had no effect … grrrr …

After doing some Google research I found a way to set the default start-up size in the .bashrc file. Open a terminal and type the following command:

gedit ~/.bashrc

This will open the .bashrc file in gedit. Add the following line:

alias gnome-terminal='gnome-terminal --geometry=200x45'

This adds an alias for the gnome-terminal command, which changes the default terminal size to 200 (width) and 45 (height). You can choose what ever value suits your resolution.