Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

drtebi · 2013-04-24 08:12:19

pacman -Rns gnome-terminal

I had Xfce-Terminal installed anyway, and for my purposes I cannot see any advantage in using gnome-terminal now, with the background transparency feature missing.

The huge changes from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 where already quite confusing; I tried to like it, but couldn't. Eventually I switched to Enlightenment e17 and I really love it.

Just my 2 cents.

spikeh · 2013-04-24 08:12:35

hoschi wrote:

The problem of GNOME3 is not GNOME-Shell, it is the constant removal of features. And even more worse, the developers didn't communicate their changes nor react on good critic.
Instead they believe the blogs are unfair or the people just hate new things like the GNOME-Shell.

Major feature removed! The complete work of many developers put into X11, AIGLX, Compositing and so on lead the transparent terminal-emulators. Which make terminals nice but also better more usable. Holy s**t! Every terminal supports transparency nowadays, just no longer gnome-terminal. I'm just freaking out, because the developers of GNOME resist to learn anything. It is not this single item, it happens with every release since "3.0".
With the last release they removed Find-As-You-Type from Nautilus and replaced it with the slow new search. I just wonder, what they remove with 3.10, tabs from Nautilus or Epiphany?

I noticed the removal of find-as-you-type as well, moving from Nemo/Cinnamon back to Nautilus/Gnome Classic. It's ridiculous, and very annoying when working with mounted NFS filesystems! I think I will go back to using Nemo which works well in a Gnome ecosystem, perhaps you can try it too?

jasonwryan · 2013-04-24 08:34:55

hoschi, you have been around long enough to know about not ranting...

hoschi · 2013-04-24 11:12:14

I'm sorry. But I'm frustrated by the behaviour of some, but not all, GNOME-Developers. To make things better, the developers of GNOME need just to stop remove working code. I don't complain about somebody is not doing what I want (I don't have the right), but why are the developers in charge destroy work of others (mainly developers)?

Christian Persch [gnome-terminal developer] 2013-04-22 09:34:26 UTC
No.

Very productive. Answers like this will improve the situation. NOT!

Another example is the discussion around type-ahead-find.

Nice:

This is NOT your personal blog. This is NOT a mailing list for discussing your
personal opinions on the software or it's developers.

Ohhh great, just kill the discussion. Mailinglist are only for developers and forums doesn't exist.

hadrons123 · 2013-04-24 11:18:53

As they say, You can vent your frustration through your blog. Every other forms(forums,ML, Bugzilla) of discussion is generally frowned upon.

Last edited by hadrons123 (2013-04-24 11:19:31)

hoschi · 2013-04-24 11:33:09

Your right with frustration, it should be placed in a bugzilla (I'm not perfect)! But discussion? Mailing-list or IRC are not for users.

I've added a description with a workaround (devilspie):
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544

Last edited by hoschi (2013-04-24 11:51:44)

hadrons123 · 2013-04-24 11:39:06

Its for the users with discussion focussing only on technical aspects. In some forums you can pretty much vent your frustration as much you want eg. Fedora, Debian-user-forums. But Arch Linux has a reputation for not allowing rants/bikeshed topics. Soemtimes it looks like bit of less freedom, but if you think deeper it keeps the forum sane, clean and less noise. Well I 'm certainly not a staff around here to vouch for the whole forum, But this is what I have felt.

triplesquarednine · 2013-04-24 15:34:17

hadrons123 wrote:

Why recompile when you can just downgrade?

just an update / further point on this.

One other problem with downgrading is that you then need to add the package to ignorepkg in pacman.conf ... Rather than doing that this morning i modified the PKGBUILD for gnome-terminal (3.6.x) ~ i now have gnome-terminal-6.6.6 installed, which is actually 3.6.2. ....

but like i said before the long-term solution is to make a patch that carries over the missing features into gnome-terminal-3.8+ (and possibly upload that to AUR). I'll probably look at doing just this, in the next few days.

@hoschi

there is little point in complaining about gnome ~ these types of complaints come up in the (arch) forums on every major update, personally, i think it is a waste of breath -> I think these days you pretty much have to be a well-known / respected gnome developer to have any critique (or idea) taken seriously by them. - it's unfortunate, but seems to be the case. I also highly doubt any gnome-developers with any clout, read any of these postings.

WaxyMouthfeel wrote:

It looks like Gnome Terminal is tracking sort of the way Mac OS Terminal does things-- and it's transparency is part of the profile. I may ask that they add background transparency to profiles rather than ask that they just revert to the old way of doing things.

imho, Gnome does that for their entire desktop - they model most of their UI experience around Apple/MacOSX, most of the applications are designed to emulate an Apple-type experience; nautilus looks more and more like finder, and in 3.8 uses RGBA on desktop and does NOT paint desktop wallpaper (this is what MacOSX does too, and has for YEARS), system-settings is a complete clone of Apple's system settings, deja dup in 3.0 series was (literally) designed up look like MacOSX's 'time machine' ~ they even had screenshots on gnome.org of time machine at the time... this list could go on, but i will stop here..

Gnome seems to be trying to make GnOSX, not a lot of original ideas here

hoschi · 2013-04-25 13:03:42

What is written here is dedicated to users of Archlinux. I want just share my pain ;-)

Anyway, it is extremely difficult to change the mind of a GNOME-Developer. But it is possible, you need just a lot of users with a lot of pressure on a single topic. And that was just a simple change.

I'm able to program some C/C++ but not familiar with stuff around UI-Builder (lot of changes between 3.6 and 3.8). If you manage to write a patch, I'm eager to read the code! I also think about writing a concise and polite mail to their mailing-lists. At same time someone need to open a new bug and *a lot of* people need to post there (their is no vote system, so it works just in this way). I would raise again the topic that GNOME-Shell is not the problem, but feature and option removal. That a officiall way of communication and proposal of new plans is necessary (not some random wikis and blogs). And last: Behaviour of developers must change.

I like GNOME. But if the follow this path for more two years, GNOME want be no longer considered for company desktop. And a lot of private users already moved to XFCE, WM-Something or KDE.

Last edited by hoschi (2013-04-25 13:21:30)

Thorsten Reinbold · 2013-04-25 14:45:44

hoschi wrote:

The problem of GNOME3 is not GNOME-Shell, it is the constant removal of features. And even more worse, the developers didn't communicate their changes nor react on good critic.
Instead they believe the blogs are unfair or the people just hate new things like the GNOME-Shell.

Major feature removed! The complete work of many developers put into X11, AIGLX, Compositing and so on lead the transparent terminal-emulators. Which make terminals nice but also better more usable. Holy s**t! Every terminal supports transparency nowadays, just no longer gnome-terminal. I'm just freaking out, because the developers of GNOME resist to learn anything. It is not this single item, it happens with every release since "3.0".
With the last release they removed Find-As-You-Type from Nautilus and replaced it with the slow new search. I just wonder, what they remove with 3.10, tabs from Nautilus or Epiphany?

+1

I can fully understand you in that points. I mean... I like Gnome very much. But I don't like the direction of development and the way of "communication" between devs and users. I have installed gnome-terminal 3.6 again and will stay with it until another working solution is there.

rosslagerwall · 2013-04-25 15:18:46

Making new tabs inherit the previous tab's current directory can be done as documented in the commit message:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-term … 75fe62b9be

It has the advantage that opening a new tab in a directory which is a symlink keeps the same path rather than changing the path to the name of the symlink target.

Edit: maybe this should be added to the wiki

Last edited by rosslagerwall (2013-04-25 15:19:13)

hadrons123 · 2013-04-25 15:22:13

@rosslagerwall
I am certainly not a coder, but How is this relevant to the issue of this thread?

bwat47 · 2013-04-25 15:29:14

Personally I don't see how transparency makes anything more usable... If anything it would just reduce text readability. But in any case there are various other gtk terminal applications that support transparency, replacing gnome-terminal is not difficult.

Last edited by bwat47 (2013-04-25 15:29:36)

hadrons123 · 2013-04-25 15:33:57

Even I do believe the same. But why take the feature when it doesn't hurt having it there?

hoschi · 2013-04-25 16:01:43

hadrons123 wrote:

@rosslagerwall
I am certainly not a coder, but How is this relevant to the issue of this thread?

Because we talked about creating an aur package with missing features.

bwat47 wrote:

Personally I don't see how transparency makes anything more usable... If anything it would just reduce text readability. But in any case there are various other gtk terminal applications that support transparency, replacing gnome-terminal is not difficult.

You can execute command while watching through the terminal (real world examples from me: nautilus show the created file instantley? type in command which you read from a webpage in the background). Honestly, a transparent terminal looks just pretty. And people like pretty applications

Thorsten Reinbold wrote:

+1
I can fully understand you in that points. I mean... I like Gnome very much. But I don't like the direction of development and the way of "communication" between devs and users. I have installed gnome-terminal 3.6 again and will stay with it until another working solution is there.

Thanks you. I just wonder who this situation could hold on since "3.0" till now, it feels like an ivory-tower problem.

Last edited by hoschi (2013-04-25 16:09:40)

rosslagerwall · 2013-04-25 16:29:02

hadrons123 wrote:

@rosslagerwall
I am certainly not a coder, but How is this relevant to the issue of this thread?

Well it is not relevant to the background settings but it is relevant to the missing functionality that zakkudo mentioned earlier (2. New tabs/windows do not inherit the current directory.)

If you want that missing functionality back then put this in your ~/.bashrc:

export PS1='\[$(__vte_ps1)\]'$PS1

sidneyk · 2013-04-25 16:36:45

Just my 2 cents, I also noticed immediately the removal of transparent background and other things in Gnome terminal. For me, sometimes it was useful to be able to see the web page underneath for a command I was needing from a wiki or forum post without having to switch back and forth or resizing my windows to all fit at the same time in 1 view. But, mostly it was just pretty eye candy, it looked neat.

I can understand if decisions were made on the basis of, perhaps, trying to standardize the interfaces of any apps that are considered integrated and part of Gnome. It could clean up code and have a common code base for things that all programs need to do. Maybe it has something to do with a future move towards Wayland? I don't know, I haven't searched that deep and, like others have said, the communications between users and Gnome devs may be lacking. There were changes in the 3.6 Nautilus that didn't thrill me either, but I either found work arounds or got used to it.

I personally like Gnome and Gnome-Shell and yes I get frustrated when my extensions get broken with every major update (even if truthfully those extensions had long standing problems, undeclared variables and such). I can understand why the devs may need to filter out some of the noise during active development phases in order to concentrate on the technical goals they have agreed on or even to correct something that gets in the way of those goals. It would be nice to get an explanation for decisions to change things, i.e. 'we did it to simplify code base between apps' or whatever.

I'm sure that it is also not easy to come up with something that can work equally well, whether on the desktop or on a touch device, but you have to consider the touch devices as they become more prolific, if you have hopes of getting your product on them. Look at Win 8, they have a clunky thing that works with either but winds up being more touch centric and leaving the classic desktop users having to relearn things. The devs have to make decisions to keep things as simple as possible to work on all of the targeted devices they have in mind and if the desktop paradigm is evolving they have to evolve the desktop to keep up with it.

But, that is also the beauty of open source software, there is nobody holding a gun to our heads and making us use any particular software, we choose what we want to use just as the devs choose what to include or not. If they make a wrong choice and don't listen at all to the response to that choice, then they may be devving for a smaller and smaller audience.

triplesquarednine · 2013-04-25 16:46:30

rosslagerwall wrote:

If you want that missing functionality back then put this in your ~/.bashrc:
export PS1='\[$(__vte_ps1)\]'$PS1

thanks, very useful! ~ i hadn't investigated that issue yet, but had certainly noticed.

bwat47 wrote:

Personally I don't see how transparency makes anything more usable... If anything it would just reduce text readability. But in any case there are various other gtk terminal applications that support transparency, replacing gnome-terminal is not difficult.

I don't think transparency really makes something 'more usable'. but the 'background' tab does allow me to better match gnome-terminal to the rest of my desktop; i do use an image with RGBA background, as my terminal background, with transparency set to about 75% - and i do prefer it that way, over just a solid color (found in 3.8). In my use, transparency does not affect one's ability to read either.

anyway, patching gnome-terminal 3.8 doesn't seem like it is going to be very hard to do ~ it probably won't involve writing any code, either. maybe just some modifications/updating code, if/where needed.

ttll · 2013-04-30 15:56:34

rosslagerwall wrote:

If you want that missing functionality back then put this in your ~/.bashrc:
export PS1='\[$(__vte_ps1)\]'$PS1

For zsh users:

chpwd_functions+=(__vte_ps1)

hoschi · 2013-05-01 18:57:00

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p1266788

I've prepared two emais. Two long ones. If you want give me some instructions or hints, I will be thankful.

JoveYu · 2013-06-03 06:53:43

i use gnome-terminal 3.6 from AURh ttps://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gnome-terminal36/

wild_coder · 2015-08-26 22:49:04

HI,

If you use gnome you can install this extension https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/ … t-windows/. Which makes the terminal transparent and optionally all the other windows too.

Arch Linux

#26 2013-04-24 08:12:19

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#27 2013-04-24 08:12:35

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#28 2013-04-24 08:34:55

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#29 2013-04-24 11:12:14

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#30 2013-04-24 11:18:53

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#31 2013-04-24 11:33:09

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#32 2013-04-24 11:39:06

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#33 2013-04-24 15:34:17

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#34 2013-04-25 13:03:42

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#35 2013-04-25 14:45:44

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#36 2013-04-25 15:18:46

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#37 2013-04-25 15:22:13

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#38 2013-04-25 15:29:14

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#39 2013-04-25 15:33:57

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#40 2013-04-25 16:01:43

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#41 2013-04-25 16:29:02

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#42 2013-04-25 16:36:45

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#43 2013-04-25 16:46:30

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#44 2013-04-30 15:56:34

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#45 2013-05-01 18:57:00

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#46 2013-06-03 06:53:43

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

#47 2015-08-26 22:49:04

Re: Background settings tab missing in gnome-terminal 3.8.1

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