Terminal height shrinks - repeatedly restored shorter than the previous height

[Jay Foad]

1. Open a gnome-terminal window (from the launcher or by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T)
2. "stty -a | grep rows" reports "rows 24; columns 80;"
3. Maximize the window (by clicking on the maximize button, or double clicking the title bar, or dragging the window up to the panel)
4. Do the same again to un-maximize the window
5. Now "stty -a | grep rows" reports "rows 23; columns 79;"

Each time I do this, the window keeps getting one character shorter and one character narrower!

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: gnome-terminal 3.6.1-0ubuntu6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-17.31-generic 3.11.10.3
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-17-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Mar 6 10:22:46 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-04-15 (1421 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta amd64 (20100406.1)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-29 (128 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michisteiner (michisteiner)]

this is a duplicate of bug 1233205. It seems it is fixed in 14.04 but not 13.10 ...

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

The bug is still present in 17.10.

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

Bug 1233205 was a bug in Unity and/or Compiz. Ubuntu 17.10 uses gnome-shell.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

@Marius, Ubuntu 17.10 uses gnome-shell by dfault, but unity is still available.

Actually I'm using unity7 on 17.10, and this bug isn't present there. However, I can confirm the bug on gnome-shell + wayland.

Interestingly, trying a couple of terminal emulators (xfce4-terminal, mate-terminal) some are buggy, some are not; and when double clicking on the title, some maximize with an animation and some maximize without. No clue why this difference in animation is there, and no clue if it's relevant.

[Paul (i41bktob-launchpad-net)]

@egmont-gmail Do the other affected terminals also have scroll bars extending one pixel past the right and bottom edges, the way gnome-terminal has?

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Paul, what do you mean by "scroll bars extending one pixel past the right and bottom edges"??

[Paul (i41bktob-launchpad-net)]

Literally one pixel beyond the edges of the window. I've attached a screenshot that I hope illustrates this.

You see two windows which were auto-placed by the window manager. If they didn't have scroll bars, they wouldn't overlap, but they do, by one pixel. Depending on which window is in the foreground, the rightmost pixel of the scroll bar is either below or above the other window.

The bottommost pixel of the scroll bar extending below the window is evident in both cases.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Geez... indeed. I can confirm that look with vte and gnome-terminal Ubuntu packages. It looks awful.

I'm using vte and gnome-terminal from git (the rest is stock 17.10). They don't have this visual problem, but the shrinkage is there. So probably it's irrelevant.

Also, Ubuntu's vte & gnome-terminal packages look okay under Unity 7.

Not sure by the way if it's something that's been fixed in vte/g-t since (I can't recall anything like that) or it's caused by an Ubuntu patch (that would be my primary guess).

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Ubuntu's gnome-terminal has patch, originating from Red Hat, with the title "Extra padding around transparent terminals in Wayland". Just by its name it's truly suspicious, but I don't have time now to verify if that's causing this terrible look. Anyway, as said, it's probably irrelevant.

[Hyunseo Park (thenameless1)]

The bug is still present in fresh installed Focal Fossa (20.04).

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

This was being tracked in:

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751064

but now it seems it is in:

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/issues/129

[Utkarsh Gupta (utkarshgupta137)]

It looks like some fixes were merged in GNOME/gtk: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1606 . Waiting for them to be merged into ubuntu too.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The GTK fix is about wayland, are the reports specific about wayland there? The changes also are in 3.24.17 which is included in focal so if it's still an issue there then it's probably not the right fix for the issue

[Péter Prőhle (prohlep)]

The bug is still there in Ubuntu 20.10, see the riport in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1916890

each maximisation + un-maximisation cycle of a gnome-termial windows will shrink the terminal by 1 row and by 1 column

two such a sycles (maximize, unmaximize, maximize, unmaximize) shrinks from 80x42 to 78x40

[Péter Prőhle (prohlep)]

The bug is still there in Ubuntu 21.04, and is very disturbing when I need frequent maximalisation and reset to normal 80 columns, especially when I give classes at the university.

[LGB [Gábor Lénárt] (lgb)]

I'm using 20.04.2 LTS (focal), I can also confirm the problem exists there with Xorg and gnome-shell (no idea about 20.10 and/or Wayland though).

[Péter Prőhle (prohlep)]

The error works on 21.04 Wayland as well. This bug looks very stable, depending only on the gnome terminal itself, regardless of which version of it is used.

[Péter Prőhle (prohlep)]

The bug is still present in 21.10 .

This bug in 21.04 went away this August 2021 approx.

But upgrading from 21.04 to 21.10 brought back the bug.

[Martin D. Weinberg (martin-weinberg-5)]

I can confirm, and this has been irritating me for years.

I suggest using 'terminator' as a work around.

[Péter Prőhle (prohlep)]

This bug disappeared in my case, just when I switched to 2204 Jammy. I made a fresh install from scratch, not a dist-upgrade only.

Is there anybody who still has this bug in Jammy, if his/her system is a fresh install from scratch?

[Peter Ryan (peterx14)]

@prohlep
I fresh installed Ubuntu 22.04 (64-bit) on 27th April 2022 and this is still occurring for me.
(Hopefully) video attached of me opening three terminal windows, and then pressing F11 to toggle one of them to/from full screen.

[Martin D. Weinberg (martin-weinberg-5)]

The bug disappeared for some old installs but not all. For those that still had the bug, the following seemed to fix the problem:

dconf write /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/headerbar '@mb false'

@peterx14 maybe that would help in your case as well?

[Matze (plowidal)]

For me the fix didn't work on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS :-(

[Peter Ryan (peterx14)]

@martin-weinberg-5 I tried the dconf write as you suggested, and I did alt-F2 and "r" to restart Gnome, but it doesn't seem to have changed anything.

***As I wrote the above, I remembered that I'd left some terminal windows open during the process. I've re-tested but closed all windows before restarting Gnome and it *does* resolve the problem. However, I now have a menu bar on all my terminal windows. (screen grab attached for the benefit of others).

For the moment, I'll reset that entry:
dconf reset /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/headerbar

..but hopefully that will help a little in figuring out where the underlying bug is.

[Martin D. Weinberg (martin-weinberg-5)]

Hm, perhaps I misremembered the tweak. I do recall that 22.04 did not work initially. I applied the dconf menu setting and it started to work. I reset the dconf legacy menu setting just now and it still works (i.e. no shrinking after maximization). So I'm mystified . . .

[LGB [Gábor Lénárt] (lgb)]

22.04 fresh install, even worse, the window shrunk by 3 lines each time :-O And now even shrinks by 3 rows ... I use toggle full screen back and forth, since this is what I really use a lot, not the maximize. But maximize has the same effect, just checked.

[Martin D. Weinberg (martin-weinberg-5)]

@peterx14 I did a few more experiments. One needs a new gnome session altogether for the 'headerbar' false change to work. I tried this a few times to confirm. Just killing all the terminals is not enough. However, when I login/out or kill gnome-session to restart the session manager, the problem is fixed. The side effect is that one loses all the nice gnome-terminal decoration (hamburger menu, find button, etc.). Oh well. Take your choice.

[Martin D. Weinberg (martin-weinberg-5)]

Another surprising observation: Wayland seems to work just fine for me, it's only X11 that has the maximization shrinking bug. 'headerbar' can be true or false on Wayland with 22.04. I tried it on two different installs with the same behavior.

Okay then. I guess I'll use Wayland. I liked to have the restart feature which Wayland doens't have, but I think I'd rather not have this gnome-terminal bug more than 'r'.