increase padding in gnome terminal

Edited Jun 02 2018: As of Ubuntu 18.04, you need to add one more element selector for this to work.

Paul was mostly right. This expanded solution works as of Ubuntu 14.04.1 with GNOME Terminal 3.6.2.

For all versions:

1. Add the following code to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css:
   

   VteTerminal,
   TerminalScreen,
   vte-terminal {
       padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
       -VteTerminal-inner-border: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
   }
   

   Edit: You will need to create the file if it does not already exist (thanks jonS90).

2. Kill all instances of gnome-terminal:

   $ killall gnome-terminal
   

3. Restart gnome-terminal.

I tried all answers here on Ubuntu 16.10 with gnome-terminal 3.20.2 and they didn't work. I found the up-to-date solution in this launchpad thread. In the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (which you may need to create), add this:

vte-terminal {
    padding: 10px;
}

To move the terminal output away from the window borders create the stylesheet ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css with the following setting:

TerminalScreen {
 -VteTerminal-inner-border: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
}

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=163964

You can do it with some terminals, for example old xterm

xterm -b 10 -title "-b 10" -e nano &
xterm -title "no border spec" -e nano & 

In the manual man xterm you find how to set fonts, foreground and background colours. Maybe a little tricky to configure, but very flexible.

Please go through this issue - Unity Terminal 16.04

The Comment on the Wishlist describes is very proper solutions for Ubuntu 16.04 Terminals, where we need to change file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css:

VteTerminal,
TerminalScreen {
    padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
    -VteTerminal-inner-border: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
}

TO

VteTerminal {
    padding: 10px;
}

padding works the same as normal CSS padding.