[SOLVED] Why is the space increasing between the last characters?

Bedna · 2026-08-26 10:36:49

This seems to be something that has started recently, not sure if it's terminal behavior, font behavior or desktop env behavior.
I'm on Plasma using Konsole.

for (( i=1; i<85; i++ ));do
    echo "# $(printf "%${i}s" | tr ' ' '-') #"
done

Please see how the space between the last - and the # increases by each iteration, and if I mark the text with mouse, the space moves to the left of the marking:
linking an img from ibb does not seem to work, so here is the link to the img ImgBB

Any tips on what could be going on would be appreciated.

Last edited by Bedna (2026-08-26 12:16:21)

Trilby · 2026-08-26 11:38:16

That would definitely be something about your system, so you are in the best position to do some testing to narrow it down.

You see this symptom in Konsole running in a Plasma session with some font.

First, does it replicate in other terminal emulators - I suspect the answer will be "no" and that'd narrow it down to Konsole (or it's configs).

If it does replicate in other terminals, then how about in a different session.

EDIT: also, if it's only on the last line of output, also try switching back to a plain PS1 to test.

EDIT 2: also also, if this is zsh with omz, my money's on that being the culprit.

Last edited by Trilby (2026-08-26 11:57:56)

Bedna · 2026-08-26 12:16:00

I tried it on both Konsole and Yakuake and the outcome was the same so I thought it was a font or desktop thing.
But I now installed Alacritty and it works perfectly fine there so it is something with Konsole.
zsh is with powerlevel_10k, not omz.
The issue presents itself on both zsh and bash, so shell is not the issue.

There must have been an update where things changed because this behavior is new, I went into every setting I could imagine.
I had a configured profile since way back when there was some bug where I had to define font manually but the default profile was selected.
So I switched to the configured profile (because you can't change settings in the default profile) and found the setting that must have been activated as default in a recent update.
settings > profiles (create new to be able to edit settings) > edit profile > appearance > complex text layout > DISABLE coding ligatures characters (or disable word mode all-together), and voila the issue is gone!
So a profile has to be created to be able to fix this issue.

After looking at yakuake again, it also used the default profile, so creating a new profile and changing the same setting fixed the issue there too.

Last edited by Bedna (2026-08-26 12:25:00)

Arch Linux

#1 2026-08-26 10:36:49

[SOLVED] Why is the space increasing between the last characters?

#2 2026-08-26 11:38:16

Re: [SOLVED] Why is the space increasing between the last characters?

#3 2026-08-26 12:16:00

Re: [SOLVED] Why is the space increasing between the last characters?

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