gnome-terminal - Set default profile for each theme variant

Unfortunately—as grawity also pointed out—it's not yet possible in GNOME Terminal.

The closest workaround you can do, if you'd prefer to keep using GNOME Terminal and would like to switch the look of all your terminals at once, is this:

Create a single profile that you'll be using for all your terminal windows and tabs. Create two shell scripts that change the properties of that profile. Then execute whichever of these two scripts that you wish to change to.

Such a script could go something like this (hardcode the profile ID if you want to go with a non-default profile, also obviously modify the colors according to your taste):

#!/bin/sh default=$(dconf read /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/default | tr -d "'") dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:$default/background-color '"#abcdef"' dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:$default/foreground-color '"#123456"' dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:$default/palette '[ "#000000", "#111111", "#222222", "#333333", "#444444", "#555555", "#666666", "#777777", "#888888", "#999999", "#AAAAAA", "#BBBBBB", "#CCCCCC", "#DDDDDD", "#EEEEEE", "#FFFFFF"]' 

Note that the rgb(...,...,...) syntax, as reported by the corresponding dconf read ... commands, is equally fine.

No, gnome-terminal does not support that in its current versions.

The GNOME Prompt terminal aka Ptyxis (which is built using the same libvte terminal emulation) supports color schemes which have light and dark variants. It has no UI for selecting different schemes for each mode, but it's possible to download the scheme files from its Git repo and manually combine them into a custom scheme (install it by dragging the file onto the settings window).

Prompt/Ptyxis uses libvte with GTK4, which still has a few quirks (such as wacky mouse wheel scroll speed) compared to the libvte GTK3 variant that GNOME Terminal uses, but besides that it works well.