Terminal emulators allow users to access a UNIX shell while remaining on their graphical desktop.

When GNOME Terminal starts, it can be configured to launch the user's default shell or run a custom command.

GNOME Terminal supports a couple of different compatibility options for interfacing with older software that depends on varying keyboard-to-ASCII assignments.

GNOME Terminal allows the user specify which control character or escape sequence the delete and the backspace keys should generate.

GNOME Terminal supports a basic set of 16 colors, which the user can choose.

Although this option was dropped shortly after 3.6 release, several Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Fedora patch their packages of GNOME Terminal to re-enable this feature.

[8] GNOME Terminal parses the output and automatically detects snippets of text that appear to be URLs or email addresses.

Although not a GNOME Terminal feature, some shells, e.g. tcsh and bash, offer similar[original research?]

[9] VTE, part of the GNOME project, has widgets that implement a fully functional terminal emulator.

The VTE library provides a terminal emulator widget VteTerminal for applications using the GTK toolkit.