A terminal surprise

13 Comments

I recently heard that gnome-terminal in rawhide will reflow its content when resized. I tried it out, and its true:

This has been a very longstanding feature request for gnome-terminal. It has finally been implemented by Egmont Koblinger.  Thanks!

We are planning to to land a few more improvements to gnome-terminal this cycle. Next in line is may be a gnome-shell search provider.

 

 

13 thoughts on “A terminal surprise”

  1. I assume this only works with applications that write long lines that gnome-terminal has to wrap, rather than applications like less that read $COLUMNS?

    2. less, as well as most paging/curses applications reflows itself.

      i hope there aren’t any applications out there which read $COLUMNS and then wordwrap their own output, yet output via printf.

    3. Applications like “less” handle the window size change signal and redraw their contents themselves, so there’s no change.
      The new feature is mainly useful for utilities that just dump text without caring about terminal width, such as cat, gcc, make etc…
      Where the new feature can’t help at all is applications that print something once, cutting each line at $COLUMNS, such as “ps ax” or “dpkg -l”.

    2. The feature resides in Vte >= 0.35, this is the actual terminal emulator widget behind Gnome-terminal and quite a few others. If you upgrade your Vte, you’ll get this behavior, no matter what version of Gnome-terminal or other Vte-based terminal you’re using.

  4. 1 new feature added but a lot of other features removed (like transparent background …)
    I’ve switched to xfce4-terminal anyway.

  5. Great!

    As I have to suffer OSX on my daily job, that’s the only thing that I do really miss from gnome-terminal (well and opening a new tab keeps prompts you on the folder you where already instead of always at $HOME 🙂

    1. Hey Gil,

      That actually works and always worked (apart from a brief period of time in the 3.9.x cycle, if I recall correctly) in gnome-terminal. The reason it was broken (my memory is hazy) is because gnome-terminal changed the underlying mechanism for keeping you in the current folder and distributions took time to catch up.

      I am guessing that you updated your system from GNOME 3.8 to 3.10 instead of a clean install?

  6. Nice to see a *new* feature, after all the removals.

    It makes me sad to say, but Gil Forcada is right. Their is no more transparency in gnome-terminal. And that is a personal killer for me. And to make things worse, the responsible developer marked *the working functions* deprecated in the vte-widget. VTE is a library and not part of gnome-terminal.

    What happend?
    The other terminals started to ignore the “deprecation” warnings, like Sakura.
    https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/sakura&id=2f79bf8f0410cf633ad0d4f30cec2ffc5a962757

  7. In comment #3, I said “I’ll buy a beer at GUADEC for whoever implements this.” I would like to revise this to “I’ll buy ALL THE BEERS at GUADEC for Egmont.” Egmont, come to GUADEC and get your beer.

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