Open terminal / Run terminal apps with different shells

Solution 1:

The way a terminal emulator can be set to use a different shell than your default shell differs between terminal emulators.

For gnome-terminal, you can change the shell on the "Command" tab in the "Preferences" dialog. Check "Run a custom command instead of my shell" and specify the shell you want to run.

To achieve what you want, create a new profile and change the setting as in the previous paragraph. Then, you can launch gnome-terminal with that profile, and therefore with a different shell, using the --profile= option. For example, if you named the new profile "Custom", then you can launch gnome-terminal with that profile using the following command:

gnome-terminal --profile="Custom"

To open gnome-terminal and automatically open an application, for example mc (Midnight Commander), use the empty -- at the end:

gnome-terminal --profile="Custom" -- mc

This will open the terminal emulator with mc loaded, and running on the custom shell you defined in the "Custom" profile.