GNOME Terminal Gets Text Rewrap On Resizing

[Delgarde]

fwiw, the screenshot-the-desktop approach is just fallback if you don't have a proper compositing window mgr.. and ARGB windows/surfaces are completely possible with wayland, probably easier since you don't have to worry so much about fallback paths (ie. non-compositing window mgr, etc)

How does it work, for the application to declare that *part* of the window is, say, "black, 80% opaque"? It's easy for a compositor to automatically make an entire window translucent, or to make the window decorations and border glassy (like Windows 7 does), but it's much harder for the application to tell the compositor that "everything is opaque except for this bit in the middle"...

[robclark]

I suspect not. I don't know about how gnome-terminal did it (I've never used that feature), but the approach taken elsewhere is pretty hacky. You can't get real transparency, so what they do is basically take a screenshot, and use that as a background image for the window. And that's definitely something that would be suspect under Wayland - it's a real security issue, for starters - and I know that with the port to Wayland, the Gnome screen capture tool had to be re-written such that the compositor does most of the work.

The correct way to do it would be for the application to integrate with the compositor, requesting non-opaque blending for a particular region of the window... but I imagine that would need a bit of work to pull off.

fwiw, the screenshot-the-desktop approach is just fallback if you don't have a proper compositing window mgr.. and ARGB windows/surfaces are completely possible with wayland, probably easier since you don't have to worry so much about fallback paths (ie. non-compositing window mgr, etc)

BR,
-R

[Delgarde]

I'm wondering if this transparency was portable to wayland, anyway.

I suspect not. I don't know about how gnome-terminal did it (I've never used that feature), but the approach taken elsewhere is pretty hacky. You can't get real transparency, so what they do is basically take a screenshot, and use that as a background image for the window. And that's definitely something that would be suspect under Wayland - it's a real security issue, for starters - and I know that with the port to Wayland, the Gnome screen capture tool had to be re-written such that the compositor does most of the work.

The correct way to do it would be for the application to integrate with the compositor, requesting non-opaque blending for a particular region of the window... but I imagine that would need a bit of work to pull off.

[pizzapill]

How can anyone use a transparent terminal?
If the clean up of the code base resulted in the rewrap functionality the loss of transparency was a good sacrifice.

Small monitor (laptop/netbook) & reading/applying documentation. Having a cheat sheet for new/seldomly used software in the background (vim, tmux).
I'm a software developer and I can totally understand that they wanted to get rid of a badly written codebase, but transparency is a essential feature for me.

[Akka]

How can anyone use a transparent terminal?
If the clean up of the code base resulted in the rewrap functionality the loss of transparency was a good sacrifice.

[oleid]

They say, that the feature was removed in a restructuration process of the old code base, in order to raise the code quality. Some memory leaks could be fixed that way. Maybe it will return in the future. I'm wondering if this transparency was portable to wayland, anyway. But I couldn't care less, as I pr?f?re a solid background - makes the output way better readable for me than anything transparent.

[liam]

It's nice that it's available but I'd rather Gnome adopt Final Term (http://finalterm.org/). It's nowhere near ready yet (doesn't handle output properly for even something like top, and uses too much memory/cpu) but it has such a good start. Its borrowed features from fish, hotwire, and probably others. That is what a nextgen terminal should look like.

[n3wu53r]

Just tried that. It looks really great, but the performance issues are not the worst part. Copy & paste doesn't even work. Waiting for a real release.

https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm/issues/7

It will be fixed for the final release.

[pizzapill]

Still under heavy development; no real release. You will likely have to build from git.
Still a lot of performance issues.

Just tried that. It looks really great, but the performance issues are not the worst part. Copy & paste doesn't even work. Waiting for a real release.

[sarmad]

..or you just are mistaken

Gnome 3.8 removed transparency and some other features from gnome-terminal. I was going to post a link to the bugzilla report - but it's getting an internal error / not working. Regardless, it's _even_ on wikipedia (lulz); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Terminal#Background



..But maybe you are using Ubuntu (or another distro patching it) and just aren't aware of the situation. [Ubuntu /possibly others are patching patching 'post-3.8 releases' of gnome-terminal [so am i]. (Ubuntu gnome-terminal-3.8.0 change log); https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+...-archive-extra

* note the 02_add_transparency_properties.patch under 'debian/patches'.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I'm using Ubuntu and I'm still on Ubuntu 13.04 which doesn't have 3.8. Then, let me add my voice to you guys: no transparency in 2013!! WTH?!