Black Box

Black Box is a GTK 4 and libadwaita terminal for GNOME, written in Vala by Paulo Queiroz (raggesilver) on top of the VTE widget. After a gap from version 0.14.0 in July 2023, the original author resumed releases in June 2026 with 0.15.1 and 0.15.2, still in the same repository. It suits GNOME users who want a terminal whose appearance can be tuned closely, including hiding the header bar entirely.

Settings are stored in GSettings under com.raggesilver.BlackBox and edited in the preferences window: font, padding, cell width and height, opacity, cursor shape, scrollback mode, working directory for new tabs, and separate light and dark color schemes. Color schemes are Tilix-compatible JSON files, with user schemes read from ~/.local/share/blackbox/schemes/, and the scheme can recolor the whole window. Custom keybindings, including several per action, are saved to ~/.local/share/blackbox/user-keymap.json.

Other features include tabs with renaming, floating window controls when the header bar is hidden, a context-aware header bar that changes color under sudo or SSH, desktop notifications or a tab indicator when a background command finishes, text and regex search through scrollback, and drag-and-drop of files. Sixel images can be enabled in the preferences when VTE was built with Sixel support. Version 0.15.2 added a Nautilus extension with an "Open in Black Box" entry for folders.

Version 0.15.0 dropped Flatpak support, so installation now relies on distribution packages, and 0.15.1 renamed the executable to blackbox-terminal to avoid a clash with the Blackbox window manager. Sixel depends on the distribution's VTE build, and most distributions build VTE without it. There are no split panes, VTE does not render programming-font ligatures, and rendering goes through GTK 4 rather than a dedicated GPU renderer. It runs on Linux only.