Terminal crashes on Startup

Good day!
For some reason, I am not able to open up any type of terminal. My normal xfce4-terminal crashes on startup, as well as the gnome and pantheon terminal. I don’t know what’s happening here, and can’t find any log files that would be of help. What can I do?

This does not usually happen without some prior changes - perhaps a partial update?

Switch to TTY CRTLALTF2 and log in there
then run:
sudo pacman -Syu
or
pamac update
to make sure your system is fully updated and in a coherent state

Perhaps you can even still run the update through the GUI (pamac-manager).

It may be possible to just install another terminal app like xterm
sudo pacman -S xterm
but this may also fail when the system as a whole is not in a consistent state, update-wise.

less ~/.xsession-errors
may also reveal something pertinent

I tried all that, but to no avail. Even xterm crashes on startup.
I have no idea what to do with this.

You still have a terminal, no?

Does that mean that your system IS fully up to date?

returns all clear?

I can access TTY yes, if that’s what you mean.

And my system is fully up to date, from kernel to packages.

scroll down to the end

nothing there?

System up to date and everything but the terminal not working
is likely a (mis)configuration issue

Try creating a new user and test there.

The .xsession-errors file has nothing of relevance written in it.

And yes, the terminal does apparently work with a new user! So what can I do now?

Isn’t it obvious?
There must be a difference in at least one configuration file in the profile of your current user account.

first move (or delete) ~/.cache
this is not critical and may already help

Then
either review the files in ~/.config, comparing the content of identically named files in both profiles and find the difference and correct it
(perhaps remember what you may have changed)
or
delete your users configuration files
(better: move them, so you still have them)
and replace with the configuration files that are used in the new user account.

These are in:
/etc/skel
and are used when a new user is created

… everything under ./config
and the shell configuration in, for example:
.bashrc
.bash_profile
.Xresources

By doing this, you end up with the default configuration that you had when you first installed.

1 Like

Thanks, I got it now!
In my .bashrc file I had this line: export LANG='en_GB.UTF-8', which for some reason caused my terminal to crash. Maybe because my local is de_AT?
Whatever it is, thanks a lot!

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