terminal that can handle being resized?

Matt Brown

17 Sep 2008 17 Sep '08

6:31 p.m.

I'm using one of the standard layouts, where one window is bigger than all the others, which is great, except my terminal emulator (xterm, tried rxvt too) doesn't handle being resized very well. It starts wrapping at the new width (also great). My problem is that when a window starts out big, then gets shrunk and restored to its original size, all the old lines are truncated at the small width. the rest of the window is blank. is there a terminal that can handle being resized better, or a config option for either of these? or is there a way I can get xmonad to ask the window to redraw itself? thanks -matt

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Gwern Branwen

17 Sep 17 Sep

7:10 p.m.

On 2008.09.17 15:31:59 -0700, Matt Brown scribbled 0.6K characters:

...

I'm using one of the standard layouts, where one window is bigger than all the others, which is great, except my terminal emulator (xterm, tried rxvt too) doesn't handle being resized very well. It starts wrapping at the new width (also great). My problem is that when a window starts out big, then gets shrunk and restored to its original size, all the old lines are truncated at the small width. the rest of the window is blank. is there a terminal that can handle being resized better, or a config option for either of these? or is there a way I can get xmonad to ask the window to redraw itself?

thanks -matt

I think the standard recommendation is not rxvt or xterm, but rxvt-unicode/urxvt; I've also found gnome-terminal to work pretty well. -- gwern Ft. RSO JUWTF cybercash Forte KLM broadside erco Defcon 1080H

brian

7:54 p.m.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:

...

I think the standard recommendation is not rxvt or xterm, but rxvt-unicode/urxvt

I've never understood this. I use urxvt because it's good for Chinese fonts and stuff, but I've never noticed it being any better about the resizing issue. For example, I'll have one term open and open another one with the intent to do something with text in the first one, but after creating the second term, the text in the first one has been trashed. The doing-anything-makes-everything-resize thing is dwm disease that didn't happen with the ion fixed frames way. I miss it so much sometimes I think about going back, despite xmonad being an overwhelmingly better way.

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH

7:58 p.m.

On 2008 Sep 17, at 19:54, brian wrote:

...

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:

...
I think the standard recommendation is not rxvt or xterm, but rxvt- unicode/urxvt

The doing-anything-makes-everything-resize thing is dwm disease that didn't happen with the ion fixed frames way. I miss it so much sometimes I think about going back, despite xmonad being an overwhelmingly better way.

Hm? Use the Full or Tabbed layouts, you don't have to worry about it. xmonad gives you the choice. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH

Matt Brown

7:59 p.m.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Gwern Branwen wrote:

...

On 2008.09.17 15:31:59 -0700, Matt Brown scribbled 0.6K characters:

...
I'm using one of the standard layouts, where one window is bigger than all the others, which is great, except my terminal emulator (xterm, tried rxvt too) doesn't handle being resized very well. It starts wrapping at the new width (also great). My problem is that when a window starts out big, then gets shrunk and restored to its original size, all the old lines are truncated at the small width. the rest of the window is blank. is there a terminal that can handle being resized better, or a config option for either of these? or is there a way I can get xmonad to ask the window to redraw itself?

thanks -matt

I think the standard recommendation is not rxvt or xterm, but rxvt-unicode/urxvt; I've also found gnome-terminal to work pretty well.

-- gwern Ft. RSO JUWTF cybercash Forte KLM broadside erco Defcon 1080H

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I tried urxvt, and it had the same problem as the others (which is really too bad, because it has some righteous features). gnome-terminal handles the resizing, but is less customizable. i guess no perfect solution yet.

Andreas Niederl

18 Sep 18 Sep

3:57 a.m.

Hi, Matt Brown wrote:

...

I'm using one of the standard layouts, where one window is bigger than all the others, which is great, except my terminal emulator (xterm, tried rxvt too) doesn't handle being resized very well. It starts wrapping at the new width (also great). My problem is that when a window starts out big, then gets shrunk and restored to its original size, all the old lines are truncated at the small width. the rest of the window is blank. is there a terminal that can handle being resized better, or a config option for either of these? or is there a way I can get xmonad to ask the window to redraw itself?

I'm also having this problem and after some stracing I'm pretty sure that I'm experiencing a race condition in the Linux kernel between the terminal size ioctls. According to a Debian bugreport [1] mentioned on the rxvt-unicode list [2] this was introduced in 2.6.26rc1 and resolved in 2.6.27rc1. Regards, Andi [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=483564 [2] http://lists.schmorp.de/pipermail/rxvt-unicode/2008q3/000688.html

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Andreas Niederl
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
brian
Gwern Branwen
Matt Brown