Re: gnome-terminal dimensions

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 08:51:12AM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 10:43:12PM -0700 or thereabouts, Jeff Coppock wrote:
> >    I'm having trouble figuring out how to set gnome-terminal to
> >    open to a specific dimension.  I want it to open to 80x45+0+0
> >    everytime I start it.  
> >    
> >    Can someone point me in the right direction?
> 
> The gnome-terminal help page :) 
> 
> gnome-terminal --geometry=80x45 is the example in it.

And unfortunately, this is the only way to do it. There is (currently)
no way to set up g-t to automatically use 80x45 whenever you start it as
'gnome-terminal' from the command line or whatever. This is because the
80x24 dimension is hard-coded into the source code and used in lieu of
any particular geometry arguments.

> You can get the position to work, too. But note: gnome-terminal's
> geometry is buggy :( You can get some weird effects occurring. (If you
> do, bugzilla them :))

Well, to avoid a flood of what will basically be "me too" bugs, let me
outline the known geometry problems:

(1) Starting with a size of 0 for either height or width causes a crash
(this is fixed in CVS, but the released versions still go boom).

(2) The positioning part of the --geometry flag is broken in a well
understood fashion: the geometry parsing code in libgnome treats
everything as though it applies to the top left hand corner. This means
that specifying something like 80x45-0-0 will place the terminal's
top-left corner at the bottom-right of your screen. The correct X
behaviour is to place the bottom right corner of the terminal there, so
the g-t behaviour is a little flawed. Further, things like 80x45--10+0
do not work (it should place the right hand edge 10 pixels off the
righthand side of the screen), for the same reason.

This geometry parsing problem cannot be fixed in Gnome 1.x, since it
requires a change to the API of the appropriate libgnome function that
would break everything. It's being fixed in Gnome 2.0 (right down at the
GTK level so that it works for everything), though, so please wait
impatiently. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm

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