Comment 17 for bug 946095

I investigated since I wanted to understand what was going on here. I thought this was probably an Ambiance-related theme issue, but I was wrong. (I've also posted the following explanation at the upstream ticket at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694598 .)

Back in GNOME 2.32, both gedit and gnome-terminal stored settings in GConf. At that time the gedit terminal plugin looked at gnome-terminal's GConf settings to read the default profile information to find out what colors to use. You
can see that code here:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gedit-plugins/tree/plugins/terminal/terminal.py?h=gnome-2-32

Then in GNOME 3.0 gedit ported over to GSettings, but gnome-terminal was still using GConf. The terminal plugin could no longer easily look at the gnome-terminal profile info, so the terminal plugin just started using the
default colors from the VTE terminal widget (which look poor, hence this bug). At that time the terminal plugin code added this FIXME line:

   def get_profile_settings(self):
        #FIXME return either the gnome-terminal settings or the gedit one
        return Gio.Settings.new("org.gnome.gedit.plugins.terminal")

Now, finally, in GNOME 3.8 gnome-terminal has been ported to use GSettings:

  https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-terminal/tree/NEWS?h=gnome-3-8

So it should now be possible to fix this bug by having the terminal plugin read profile information from GSettings.