Can you help me with this experiment?

[hazel]

I have discovered some odd behaviour in Xterm and I would like to know if more modern terminals like gnome-terminal show it too. Here is the what I would like you to do:

1) Open a terminal and maximise it. List a fairly large directory. As there is plenty of room, your listing will probably occupy 4-5 columns.
2) Restore the terminal to its default size. What happens to the display?
3) Maximise it again. What happens now?

Xterm does not change its display in response to the window manager's configure event. When the window becomes smaller, the right-hand side of the listing is simply cut off. And when the window is maximised again, the display remains right-truncated.

How general is this behaviour? I'm pretty sure that gtk-based apps don't do this.

[oz]

Hello, hazel... just a quick note to say that I use urxvt as my terminal.

Now, I attempted your instructions, but since full-screen is the original size for a terminal opened on a new desktop using a tiling window manager (dwm), it didn't work very well. Opening a second terminal window on the same desktop reduced the first terminal window size, but the columns lined up properly. Opening xterm using the same steps worked the same here as with urxvt. No problems with columns lining up properly, and there were no files off the screen.

Repeating the process but starting off with two xterms on the desktop, then killing one so that the other goes full-screen, then reopening a second window to reduce the size of the full-screen window produced the same results as above - no problems here.

This brings me to wonder if the behavior you are seeing could be more window manager related than it is application related?

[elija]

mate-terminal redraws the screen as I expected. So does the Mint version of xterm but it doesn't have a scrollbar.

[oz]

hazel, to go another step forward with this, I tested the above on my openbox machine, it also running urxvt, and the files all moved to their proper positions when the window was resized back to normal size. While at it, I went ahead and tested it using xterm as well, and again no problems there, either.

[hazel]

hazel, to go another step forward with this, I tested the above on my openbox machine, it also running urxvt, and the files all moved to their proper positions when the window was resized back to normal size. While at it, I went ahead and tested it using xterm as well, and again no problems there, either.

I first noticed this behaviour with dwm in AntiX. When I had an xterm open and I opened another window, dwm shrank the xterm window to half width (as expected), but when I closed the other program, I noticed that the display, now in a full-size window again, had been right-truncated.

I then tried it with IceWM in SlackIce using maximise and resize operations as the nearest analogy, and found the same behaviour. Any new listing accomodates itself to the current window width but old listings are not redrawn. AntiX has version 278 of xterm and SlackIce has version 281, so it seems to be a general problem. I'm surprised that you don't see this behaviour.

[oz]

My xterm version is 291 so maybe something has changed, or maybe I goofed on the testing somehow.

[rokytnji]

Xterm does not change its display in response to the window manager's configure event. When the window becomes smaller, the right-hand side of the listing is simply cut off. And when the window is maximised again, the display remains right-truncated.

Yeah. For once. I am not in AntiX right now hazel. So I tried it in Mate terminal 1.4 in Mint 14. It gives the same behavior you describe. I did "ls" after cd-ing into /etc.

Full screen everything shows. Minimize it is cut off. Maximize it is back.

If you try minimize size and use "ls" . Everything shows. If you maximize. Same readout pattern shows as minimize with empty space on the right. It does not redraw to fill up empty unused space. I noticed that one behavior in AntiX though with Roxterm and xterm ages ago.

[rokytnji]

mate-terminal redraws the screen as I expected.

Not for me elija.

http://i.imgur.com/sb9Xyjw.jpg

readout ends with menu listings when scrolled down elija.

[oz]

Don't know, I must have goofed the first time around, or I looked at it wrong because I just tested it again from within dwm, and this time xterm did indeed cut off some of the files.

Doing the same test with urxvt gave all the files but they were a bit scrambled and it drew a vertical scrollbar.

[elija]

Not for me elija.

http://i.imgur.com/sb9Xyjw.jpg

readout ends with menu listings when scrolled down elija.

Don't know, I must have goofed the first time around, or I looked at it wrong because I just tested it again from within dwm, and this time xterm did indeed cut off some of the files.

Doing the same test with urxvt gave all the files but they were a bit scrambled and it drew a vertical scrollbar.

What he said! I tried again and this time saw that many of the files were missing from the list when I made the window smaller.

Feeling daft now