Adding a border to gnome-terminal

On a new 14.04 plain vanilla Ubuntu install, with the default theme, nothing special. Bring up a gnome-terminal window (Ctrl + Alt + t) The terminal window has no border (nor does it have a resize handle btw) it's a black rectangle.

How can I add a 1px white border (which I find useful when dealing with multiple overlapping gnome-terminal windows)?

Copy your favorite theme from /usr/share/theme to ~/.theme. Name the theme folder something different from what it was named in the /usr/share/theme. This way when you select your chosen them you'll find it by the name you called the folder.

Example:

cp -R /usr/share/themes/Radiance/ ~/.themes/MyRadiance

Edit the gtk-3 folder of that new directory to make your borders any way you want them. You can also customize other components of the theme. It can be done by editing the UnityDecoration features of the unity.css file located in the apps folder:

~/.themes/MyRadiance/gtk-3.0/apps/unity.css

To change the borders change the 0's to a different number of the parameter:

-UnityDecoration-extents: 28px 0 0 0;

You can see all the possible editings here. Also, to use the new theme you have to install the Unity Tweak Tool.

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

To apply this for terminal add the following to gnome-terminal.css: UnityDecoration { -UnityDecoration-extents: 28px 1px 1px 1px; }

You can come close to the effect you're looking for if you use compizconfig-settings-manager.

Navigate to the 'Unity' plugin and select 'Decorations'. Check the box 'Override Theme Settings' and you can give windows a 'window shadow radius' and a color and opacity. But, you can also set X and Y shadow offsets. Set those offsets to 0, set the shadows to white or whatever you want for active/inactive windows, turn the opacity up, and then you'll have borders (should be close enough anyway).

Hopefully it's good enough to get on with, best of luck!