I only recently got around to properly dealing with the removal of --disable-factory and such.  I've gotten my gnome-terminal setup to a place where it's working very nice again (probably even better than before), but it could be a bit better.

Here's what I have so far:

 - I have 5 different terminal profiles:

    - default, spadina, jhbuild, lcl, white

       - default is pretty typical.
       - spadina sshs to my server and connects to my screen (for irssi)
       - jhbuild runs 'jhbuild shell'
       - lcl runs 'lcl' which is something similar to jhbuild shell

spadina has a black background.  default has a dark blue background.  jhbuild has a dark green background.  lcl has a dark red background.  I use this to tell them apart when I have lots of windows open.

When I'm outside in bright sunlight and it's difficult to see the screen, I sometimes switch any one of these to 'white', which has a large font and is black-on-white in order to improve visibility.  I never want to start a 'white' terminal on its own -- I consider it to be a variation of the other profiles, in a way (I mention it to show that I'm using profiles in two different ways).

For each profile (taking spadina as an example) I have a setup like this:

==> .local/share/applications/ca.desrt.Terminals.spadina.desktop <==
[Desktop Entry]
Name=spadina
Exec=gnome-terminal --app-id ca.desrt.Terminals.spadina --profile=spadina
Icon=/home/desrt/.local/share/icons/spadina.png
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;GTK;Utility;TerminalEmulator;System;
StartupNotify=true
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.18

==> .local/share/dbus-1/services/ca.desrt.Terminals.spadina.service <==
[D-BUS Service]
Name=ca.desrt.Terminals.spadina
Exec=/usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server --app-id ca.desrt.Terminals.spadina --class ca.desrt.Terminals.spadina


This is working pretty nicely.  The --class argument is currently being ignored because of bug 685742 but it doesn't matter that much because gnome-shell prefers _GTK_APPLICATION_ID to WMCLASS, if it is set.


Ideally, I'd like to be able to make the following changes:

 - remove the Exec line from the .desktop file

 - change the .desktop file to DBusActivatable=true

 - add a --default-profile= argument to the .service file

 - perhaps prevent profiles other than this one from being started with
   that instance of the service (but note: should be able to change during
   runtime to 'white')

 - for the profile 'spadina', this consists of an ssh to my server and
   connection to my running screen instance.  I never want to have more than
   one of these, so the ability to disable Ctrl+Shift+N and Ctrl+Shift+T for
   this case would be nice.  This is sort of like a single-instance app for
   which you only ever want one window.

It would also be nice if there was some sort of a UI to automatically configure this for a given profile ("Install profile as application" or so).  This could perhaps create an appid org.gnome.Terminal.Profile.UUID_GOES_HERE.  This could also be used to find the correct profile when gnome-terminal-server is started with that app-id, instead of having to use --default-profile.

I guess the main TODOs here break down to:

 - add --default-profile to the server
 - implement GApplication::activate
 - add the profile saving UI