How to change gnome-terminals startup directory?

Read the official gnome-terminal FAQ
See also this bugreport.

If you use Debian and don't want to wait for the different maintainers to finally decide where "the best position for the script" is, you can do the following:

Edit ~/.bashrc, search for the following lines (might look slightly different):

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
  PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
  PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
fi

and add to the else branch:

  # XXX hack to fix ctrl + shift + N
  . /etc/profile.d/vte.sh

Resulting in:

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
  PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
  PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
  # XXX hack to fix ctrl + shift + N
  . /etc/profile.d/vte.sh
fi