Re: Terminal view alignment at bottom might be better

[Ben Abbott]

On Jun 23, 2013, at 3:21 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

> After using the GUI for a while I've noticed that the alignment of the 
> terminal window is at the top, meaning that there is always a complete line 
> and not a fraction of a line visible at the top.  The consequence of this is 
> that the bottom of the terminal is not aligned and there can be a fraction of 
> the line extending past the end of the view depending upon how one manually 
> sizes the window.  This isn't nice to work with because all the activity when 
> typing is at that bottom line.  If one thinks about it, the typical terminal 
> window in a desktop environment doesn't have this concern because the overall 
> size of the window jumps in discrete character heights, not pixel sizes when 
> adjusted.
> 
> The routine that computes position, from what I gather, is 
> TerminalView::scrollImage in TerminalView.cpp, and in fact the alignment 
> point does seem to be upper left:
> 
> // note:  it is important that the area of the display which is
> // scrolled aligns properly with the character grid -
> // which has a top left point at (_leftMargin,_topMargin) ,
> // a cell width of _fontWidth and a cell height of _fontHeight).
> 
> The code in this file is derived from somewhere else, so I'm not sure how we 
> handle this situation.  Just make edits?
> 
> I suppose there are two ways to address this:
> 
> 1) Allow alignment at the top left, but make sure there is no fractional line 
> at the bottom.  Instead, allow there to be a fractional line of white space 
> at the bottom.
> 
> 2) Alignment at the bottom left, which means that the top of the terminal 
> window is where there will be a fractional line.
> 
> I kind of prefer the second behavior for the reasons that the top of the 
> window isn't where the user's eyes are drawn when typing and also a 
> fractional line at the top does give the impression that the text is 
> scrolling upward and there might be additional lines scrolled past the top of 
> the window.
> 
> Dan

Maybe a 3rd?

3) Snap the command window height to an integer number of lines?

Don't most (all?) terminal windows work that way?

Ben