Can I hide the tabs in gnome-terminal?

Question

I would like to be able to hide the tabs in gnome-terminal since I switch tabs with shortcuts and don't need or want the graphical tabs. Is there a way to hide them?

Answer 1

This works for me on Debian 10 with gnome-terminal 3.30.2.

If you look at the allowed values for tab-policy you will see:

$ gsettings range org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings tab-policy
enum
'always'
'automatic'

With a couple of minor changes to /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.Terminal.gschema.xml you can enable what appears to be an existing setting that will allow you to turn the tabs on and off.

--- /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.Terminal.gschema.xml  2018-12-25 13:45:29.000000000 -0800
+++ /tmp/org.gnome.Terminal.gschema.xml 2019-12-06 13:22:19.318272624 -0800
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
    <enum id='org.gnome.Terminal.TabsbarPolicy'>
     <value nick='always' value='0'/>
     <value nick='automatic' value='1'/>
-    <!-- <value nick='never' value='2'/> -->
+    <value nick='never' value='2'/>
   </enum>
 
    <enum id='org.gnome.Terminal.ThemeVariant'>
@@ -727,7 +727,7 @@
     </key>
 
     <key name="tab-policy" enum="org.gnome.Terminal.TabsbarPolicy">
-      <default>'automatic'</default>
+      <default>'never'</default>
       <summary>When to show the tabs bar</summary>
     </key>

After the change you should see 'never' as a possible value:

$ gsettings range org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings tab-policy
enum
'always'
'automatic'
'never'

Note that you might need to run the following as root after editing the xml file:

# cd /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas
# glib-compile-schemas .

After restarting your gnome-terminal tabs can be turned off with:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings tab-policy 'never'

And turned back on with:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings tab-policy 'always'

Update (Oct 2021)

The above no longer works in Debian 11. The schema change now needs to be made in the source. The following works for me.

$ apt source gnome-terminal
$ cd gnome-terminal-3.42.0

edit src/org.gnome.Terminal.gschema.xml and uncomment the never value in TabsbarPolicy

$ debuild -b -uc -us
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i gnome-terminal_3.42.0-1_amd64.deb gnome-terminal-data_3.42.0-1_all.deb