Terminator new window location on spanned desktop

[Jeff Albert]

Hello,
I understand that you've done a major rewrite of Terminator since the old 0.1x days - and thanks, by the way; the new features are excellent, and it's nice to see active development underway - but there's one little regression (in my opinion) that's been bugging me since the upgrade to 0.95. I run a large spanned desktop across two monitors, and Terminator in the 0.1x days used to open its new window on the screen that it was invoked, allowing me to quickly open a full-screen terminator on both monitors. Now, Terminator opens its new window always on the primary screen, and I have to un-fullscreen it and drag it across to fullscreen it on the other screen. This is, admittedly, a minor niggle, and I understand that I can probably leverage the geometry parameter to work around it, but having to run a different command for each monitor is annoying too, especially since it used to 'just work'. Is this something that can be restored to its former function?

Cheers,
Jeff

[Jeff Albert (jeff-jeffalbert)]

Known affected system:
Fedora 12, kernel 2.6.32.21-168
Gnome 2.28.2
Compiz 0.8.2-24
Compiz-Fusion 0.8.2-7

Reproducing the error:
1. Open a new gnome-terminal window on either screen.
2. Launch terminator from the gnome-terminal session.
3. Terminator will launch its new window on the primary screen.
4. Open a new gnome-terminal on the screen opposite the Terminator window.
5. Launch a new instance of Terminator from the new gnome-terminal session
6. Terminator will open on the primary screen, above the first Terminator window.

Requested behaviour (demonstrable in versions < 0.9):
New Terminator windows should open on the screen of their parent window.

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

I don't necessarily disagree with the requested behaviour, I'm more curious how this difference has come about. We have never explicitly done anything to open ourselves near a parent window, so some other design difference must be causing the behaviour to have changed.
I'd also like to know if there is a generally prevailing precedent about this - second guessing the window manager seems risky.

[Jeff Albert (jeff-jeffalbert)]

Unfortunately, I don't have the developer chops to speak without qualification on the intent of the window manager except by anecdotal experience. That said, every other application I open via a parent window, either gnome-terminal or more commonly gnome-do (a great general-purpose app launcher) appears on the same screen as that parent window.

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

Hi Bug subscribers, this is the maintainer (Steve Boddy) of Terminator, who took over from Chris.

In case you were not aware there has been a new release 0.98 of Terminator in the last few days which has many changes, fixes and updates. We also have an ongoing GTK3 port which uses a much more up-to-date libvte.

Even with the ~50 issues closed by that release, and discounting the ~90 outstanding wishlist items, we still have an unwieldy 95 bugs. With the oldest approaching it's 6th birthday and some that haven't seen any updates in nearly 5, it is time for a purge.

My intention is to try and get this list down to a minimum, and for that I need your help.

First I'm going to work through, oldest to newest, setting bugs to Incomplete, pending confirmation that they are still an issue. If after a month there is no feedback, the issue will get closed as Invalid. Here's where you come in. I can't always reproduce, or setting up (i.e. other distros) to even test takes a long time, so I'm going to try crowdsourcing this.

1. Get the latest release. Is it still an issue? If yes, set the confirmed-0.98 tag. For bonus points follow the guide http://gnometerminator.blogspot.com/2015/09/so-you-want-to-try-terminator-gtk3.html and see if the GTK3 branch has same issue, and set the confirmed-gtk3 or notaffected-gtk3 tag.

2. Can you reproduce with an empty/default config file? You can pass "-g temp_config" to do this without affecting your existing config. If you already have Terminator running, you'll need to pass -u as well to disable the DBus.

3. If able to, can you reproduce with another user/guest account?

4. If the issue does not already have clear, precise instructions to reproduce with minimal setup/steps, add them.

5. Put as much info about what you are running.
   * Software/library versions (libvte, gtk, pango, cairo, distro, desktop environment, language)
   * Screens (single or multi)
   * Any unusual / custom packages or configs that might be interacting.

6. If possible attach the config file, unless the issue also happens with an empty one, but mention that.

7. Attach the "-d" debug output from 0.98.

Some common things that cause incidents.

* Strange sizing issues or rapidly shrinking windows - Try turning off Window geometry hints.
* Input (esp. broadcasting duplicate chars etc) problems - Try killing IBus.
* Hand editing of the config file can cause various issues - Due to misunderstanding, incorrect structure or typos.
* Some issues are actually in libvte - This is why testing GTK3 is so important.
* segfaults - Unfortunately these are dying inside the C libraries, and it is usually beyond me to fix those.

Many thanks for your assistance, and hopefully this will get us closer to a bug-free Terminator.

[Stephen Boddy (stephen-j-boddy)]

Hi, maintainer here. Terminator has moved on from gtk2 and we now have a brand-spanking new gtk3 version. Sadly we also have many ancient bugs, and it's not really practical to struggle to replicate them considering how widely the code bases have diverged.

I'm setting these older bugs to Invalid. If you wish to reactivate the bug please reproduce with at least gtk3 and release 1.90 (even better if you use head of the gtk3 branch), then set the status to New. This way we only have to focus on things that still impact users.