I believe you can configure gnome-terminal to use the dark theme by enabling the dark-theme setting, like this:

gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings dark-theme true

You can also do it by clicking on a checkbox in the preferences window[1]. The help page says you have to open the profile preferences, but it was in the normal preferences window in my case.

There might be a reason I am unaware of that explains why it is this way, but if that is not the case, I naturally agree that gnome-terminal should use the dark theme if it is globally enabled, without being specifically asked to do so.

[1] https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-terminal/stable/pref-theme.html

(In reply to comment #1)
> ...
> You can also do it by clicking on a checkbox in the preferences window[1]. The
> help page says you have to open the profile preferences, but it was in the
> normal preferences window in my case.

Indeed, that works. And it points to a bug in the documentation. I didn't see that option, as I have the "Show menubar" option disabled.

> There might be a reason I am unaware of that explains why it is this way, but
> if that is not the case, I naturally agree that gnome-terminal should use the
> dark theme if it is globally enabled, without being specifically asked to do
> so.

Agreed.

(In reply to comment #0)

> eventhough the "Use colors from system theme" checkbox is checked in the
> profile preferences.

That one refers to the inside area of the terminal, not the Gtk+ chrome (menu and stuff).

(In reply to comment #2)
> And it points to a bug in the documentation. I didn't see
> that option, as I have the "Show menubar" option disabled.

Sure, it's under Preferences instead of Profile preferences. Fixed.

(In reply to comment #0)

> I would expect gnome-terminal to respect the global dark theme set in
> gnome-tweak-tool.

Gnome-terminal has its own setting instead of the global one, because some users (and the Fedora distro) chooses to make an exception from the global Gtk setting and override it to be dark. That's the reason it has a separate setting.

On the other hand, if you have the light theme everywhere and want to switch to dark globally, changing the global setting doesn't effect g-t, it stays bright. This is indeed undesired, one would expect that gnome-terminal also changes.

I can see two possible approaches to fix this situation:

1. Have a three-state setting in g-t: use the default, force light, or force dark. Not sure if transitioning from the current boolean setting would be problematic or not, but it's sure doable. The Prefs dialog would look a bit uglier.

2. Use dark theme if either the global or the g-t setting says so. This breaks symmetry between light and dark: you can have a setup where g-t is dark and everything else is light, but not the other way around. It's probably okay, since the rationale behind this checkbox is that many people prefer the traditional black background for terminals; noone's likely to go the other way around. The "Use dark theme variant" checkbox would be renamed to "Force dark theme variant".

ChPe, any preference which one to go for?

This was recently discussed in bug 707206

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 707206 ***

Maybe this could be resolved by using the dark theme by default, like eog. There would be an option to force white, or maybe follow the global theme, but the default would be the dark theme. I never met anyone who disliked a dark terminal.

Right now I searched the Web and found a rant by Linus Torvalds (on Fedora), plus some comments in a forum (again Fedora) about fonts being too dark. This could probably be prevented by using Tango as the default color palette.

(I'm using GNOME 3.16 on Arch Linux.)

Please see bug 721932 - that's where the main discussion happened.

Note that a tristate is unimplementable due to missing gtk+ API (bug 507398).