Comment 6 for bug 87720

Nope, Terminator can use some Gnome features, and uses the Gnome terminal widget, but it's not a Gnome application; gconf support is optional, and only really there so we can use gnome-terminal settings to configure vte.

configobj: 1,100 lines of Python which depends only on Python, makes a nice human readable ini-style dotfile in ~/.config/terminator/config (the recommended freedesktop.org standard). Editable using vim and in Terminator.

gconf: 20,000 lines of C, plus a few hundred thousand lines in dependencies which includes a lot of Gnome (most of which Terminator itself doesn't need), and spawns a service, all so we can have ~/.gconf/apps/terminator/%conf.xml, and probably subdirectories in there with their own XML. Editable using gconf-editor and in Terminator.

I think I know which I prefer :)