Terminal cutting off fonts

lietu

I just installed Solus a few hours ago and have been trying it out for basic development use. I ran into one pretty significant annoyance - the bottom of the last line on the default Terminal is cut off so e.g. g looks like a q. Gets pretty old pretty quickly. I found some tip on the forums on how to add padding to it via CSS and hoped that would solve it, it didn't.

Any ideas what's up with this, and most importantly, how to fix this?

lietu

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/issues/340 this issue might be related, however I don't see any solution that I can apply myself.

lietu

Setting Monospace font size to 11pt in Budgie Desktop Settings allows me to at least work around the problem, but then the text is too large which is undesirable.

lietu

Another option is increasing "Cell spacing" for "height" to 1.15, which seems to make it more usable. Still this should not be how Solus is shipped.

WetGeek

I don't have a solution for this problem, but I thought I'd mention that Terminology is also available in the repository. It's the terminal emulator that I use anywhere I can. You might give it a try and see if it does anything to help you.

brent

Let's go back to the beginning. You installed Solus. You did not go into Budgie Desktop Settings and start playing with fonts first? Or customize fonts anywhere else after install? Or add a third-party font? What we are looking at in the pictures is default out-of-the-box Budgie with default out-of-the-box gnome-terminal?
If all that is affirmative then I gotta say I've never seen that at the forums before. Wonder if there is a broken or corrupted package? edit-spell

lietu

brent No tweaks, just the default "Hack Regular" font. After noticing this I tried to install DejaVu fonts and use the DejaVu Sans Mono which I prefer, it had the same issue.

pomon

Try. Create a file called gtk.css in .config/gtk-3.0 and paste

VteTerminal,
TerminalScreen,
vte-terminal {
    padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
    -VteTerminal-inner-border: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
}

It works for me.

lietu

pomon I literally said I tried that and it did nothing.

brent

lietu I must say that seems like such a fluke occurrence. Very weird.

lietu

Easy to reproduce steps:

1) Download Solus-4.3-Budgie.iso with SHA256 sum 5511b7d5926679a4c94f95cc18e802377c3f950beb2a70bd9145ff1c28309352 (the one right now available on https://getsol.us/download/ )

2) Launch VMWare Workstation 16 Player and create a new VM with default settings for Ubuntu 64-bit

3) Launch VM, mount Solus-4.3-Budgie.iso and boot from it

4) Start "Terminal" in the live environment

5) Hit enter until you reach the bottom edge and then type in gpyj_ and see how the bottom is cut off of many

Alternatively use VirtualBox 6.1.34a (current version), create new VM, type Linux, version Ubuntu (64-bit), 4096MB of RAM, otherwise defaults. Then open Settings -> System -> Increase Processor(s) to 4+ -> Display -> Video Memory up to 128MB, Enable 3D Acceleration -> OK. Start, select ISO, boot, start Terminal, witness issue.

Does not seem like a fluke.

brent

lietu Alternatively use VirtualBox 6.1.34a (current version), create new VM, type Linux, version Ubuntu (64-bit), 4096MB of RAM, otherwise defaults. Then open Settings -> System -> Increase Processor(s) to 4+ -> Display -> Video Memory up to 128MB, Enable 3D Acceleration -> OK. Start, select ISO, boot, start Terminal, witness issue.

None of that ^ is out-of-the-box organic use....

but 1 thru 5 seems normal. For you it's the same in the .iso as it is in the install you did. VM the common denominator but that really can't be the factor? I don't know.

And ain't it bizzare that the teriminal does not cut itself off, it only cuts your typing off? Look at the bash: _jpgsy: command not found --that exceeds the space in which you can type but the app roams freely. Input and output in a single app are different?

Graphics card/gpu all I can guess. Was not trying to make light. Seeing a lot of weird ones lately.

lietu

brent None of that ^ is out-of-the-box organic use....

Yeah, because I couldn't get VirtualBox to boot Solus installer without all that tweaking. It would just hang once some desktop background was shown.

Anyway glad the issue was located and fixed.

infinitymdm

I can confirm that I have this issue as well. I just haven't cared enough to bother looking for a fix yet.

I wonder what GTK version the terminal is using at present? If it's GTK4 now, that might explain why the GTK3 fix isn't working for you.

WetGeek

infinitymdm I just haven't cared enough to bother looking for a fix yet.

Same here. I've reproduced it in a VBox VM with both GNOME terminal and Terminology. But it hasn't risen to the level of an annoyance for me. At least, not one that's serious enough to require researching a fix.

To be honest, that may be because I use the VM for very limited testing purposes. 99.99% of the time I'm using Plasma, where I could not reproduce this result. Repeating the experiment on my Plasma laptop produced this:

It doesn't matter whether it's my laptop or a Plasma VM, or whether it's konsole or Terminology, if I slowly push the bottom of the window up, before it gets close to the descenders, the window's contents pop up, leaving almost a completely empty line below.

Whether it's the DE, or the terminal application, or something else, I don't know. But apparently switching to Plasma instead of Budgie would solve the problem.

WetGeek

WetGeek Plasma instead of Budgie would solve the problem

By the way, I experimented with a MATE VM, and was easily able to reproduce the issue ... even more easily than with Budgie.

I didn't try moving the bottom of the window up to see just how much of the descenders I could cut off, I just launched my MATE VM, started its default terminal, and created the above screen capture.

WetGeek

WetGeek I experimented with a MATE VM

At a risk of testing this ad absurdum, I tried using the Terminology terminal on the MATE VM. I wasn't able to reproduce the results. As with the Plasma DE, when the bottom of the window was raised to a position anywhere near the text descenders, the text was pushed up to provide the necessary clearance.

So, MATE would be a possible solution as well, but only with Terminology, not the MATE terminal.

brent

WetGeek I wonder what the common denominator is that makes this happen to some but not others(?)

WetGeek

brent I wonder what the common denominator is

My inner software engineer pondered that as well, but one would need to be able to step through the code and debug every combination that does, and does not, work as expected. That would be a task that requires a very great deal of interest on the part of someone who's qualified to do the debugging.

Most of us who might care at all are probably happy just knowing what works and what doesn't work. I chose to use the Plasma DE and the Terminology terminal that I mentioned in this thread for reasons that have nothing to do with this issue.

EbonJaeger

This should be fixed in Unstable, and available to everyone next sync. vte had some font fixes.

brent

EbonJaeger from the SC: "Libvte The VTE package contains a termcap file implementation for terminal emulators."

Never heard of it. Interesting component.

WetGeek

brent Never heard of it. Interesting component.

Libvte has a very impressive list of reverse dependencies. A change there should affect nearly every terminal emulator that's used with Solus.

However, I'm puzzled by those cases in which two differnt terminal emulators (one the DE default and the other the optional Terminology) work differently, although they're both reverse dependencies of libvte. Perhaps Terminology handles fonts independently, and only uses libvte for other functions?

The best non-Solus performer in this respect is, in my opinion, Ubuntu Budgie (10.6.1) and its Tilix terminal emulator. Its text descenders are sharply and completely visible even at the bottom of a page.