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mate-desktop / mate-terminal

The MATE Terminal Emulator
http://www.mate-desktop.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Scrolling in the 1.16 release doesn't lock to the nearest line #146

Open ghost opened 8 years ago

ghost commented 8 years ago

Scrolling in mate-terminal is smooth now, and it used to be non-smooth in such a way that it only displayed full lines. Now you can scroll up or down 50% of a line and it makes things annoying. Please restore the previous scroll behaviour and fix this.

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egmontkob commented 8 years ago

This was implemented in vte-0.44, discussed at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746690.

Any particular reason why you find it annoying? (Unusual, sure... give a few days to get used to it. All other apps (including e.g. gedit that uses monospace font, or your browser displaying a plain text file etc.) scroll by pixels, why should a terminal emulator be different?)

The shortcuts Shift+PageUp/PageDown and Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down still snap to whole lines.

monsta commented 8 years ago

why should a terminal emulator be different?

I think the same reason as with terminal resizing could be applied here...

egmontkob commented 8 years ago

You're free to disable grid-resizing in mate-terminal :)

Seriously: apps (especially fullscreen ones) really look bad in non-grid-aligned terminals, whereas I believe that with super smooth scrolling the scroll experience has become significantly better. IMO these are two quite different stories. YMMV.

We could add an API to VTE to disable this new behavior, it wouldn't be that super hard, but we'll only do it if we see a significant amount of people complaining and coming up with good reasons.

ghost commented 8 years ago

We could add an API to VTE to disable this new behavior, it wouldn't be that super hard, but we'll only do it if we see a significant amount of people complaining and coming up with good reasons.

I'm curious what "good reasons" people came up to change the previous behaviour in the first place (I'm unfortunately too occupied by daily life to read through a 14 months of bugzilla comments, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that the conversation was thorough). In all disciplines, when in the absence of strong evidence, you don't change your mind. If it ain't broke, if p>0.05, don't recolour the logo, don't revise the law, don't assume that cancer causes green jelly beans, and don't change how terminal scrolling locks to lines.

Change should be inherently conservative, especially when it affects something that is major and has always been the same. To make a change first (was this bug publicised? Why are there only two participants other than you?) and then require "a significant amount of people complaining and coming up with good reasons" just to bring back the previous long-standing behaviour as an optional setting is antithetical to the concept of due process in this world.

But maybe that's just me...

egmontkob commented 8 years ago

In my opinion, scrolling (with touchpad) became a more pleasing user experience, and easier for the eye to follow the contents.

We have a public bugtracker, a public git repository, and public beta releases. This feature has been there for almost a year now. I keep an eye on almost all vte-based emulator's bugtracker, you're the first one I saw complaining.

You're free to have whatever opinion about what principles a software's development should follow, but you really shouldn't expect everyone out there to follow the same ones ;) In my opinion, it's outright impossible to develop a software if each and every modification requires a new config option to be introduced to revert to the previous behavior.

If you wish to work on a patch, I'd be happy to guide you with a sentence or two about where to touch the code. I'm not the project's main developer though, so I cannot guarantee that the patch will be accepted. I myself will probably do it if I see this being a popular demand.

monsta commented 7 years ago

I guess this can't be changed in terminals without some additional API from VTE? If so, I will close this as non-fixable at our side.

PeteAU commented 7 years ago

+1 The pixel scrolling is a bit unpleasant and performance is poor. Any chance of a checkbox in the Scroll tab to disable it?

egmontkob commented 7 years ago

Tracked upstream at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=786778.