Ubuntu – Terminal Emulator with different background color per instance

Srigelsford from the Ubuntu forums recommends this:

I created several profiles in gnome-terminal with the settings I wanted, then created aliases like the below example to ssh to ares. The Ares profile has a red background.

alias -p ares='gnome-terminal --window-with-profile=Ares -x bash -c "ssh ares"; exit'

The pitfall of this is that it cannot be done in your existing terminal window, it launches another. My alias closes the existing one after launching the new one, but you can stop that by removing the ; exit from the end.

Just create as many profiles as you like, and associate each server to a profile in an alias. To launch just type the name of the alias $ares

urxvt is probably the single most configurable emulator out there. Install it with

sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Then edit the ~/.Xdefaults file adding the following:

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: xdg-open
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-\[\]]*[\\w/-]

Using xdg-open allows you to use whatever browser you have specified in system settings (works for Gnome at least, unsure about KDE). Unfortunately, the default looks of urxvt are not, shall I say, very convincing, it's more like the old xterm than the modern gnome-terminal, and the configuration runs through config files rather than context menus. There is a tutorial on how to configure it, however.

Personally, I don't mind such configuration mode, in my experience you rarely want to reconfigure your terminal.