xfce4-terminal problems caused by changes in the Xubuntu 18.10 release

Submitted by Jeffery Small

Assigned to Igor @f2404

Description

These two problems arose only after the upgrade from Xubuntu 118.04 to 18.10 and were verified by another user on the Xfce Forums.

Problem #1

If I have an xfce4-terminal on the desktop and start a program such as the nn(1) news reader or mutt(1) mail reader, the programs start properly and recognize the terminal geometry. They utilities will also adapt properly to the terminal being resized.

However, if you start a terminal and specify the utility using the -e flag, such as:

xfce4-terminal -T Mutt --geometry 80x34+938+0  -e /usr/bin/mutt
xfce4-terminal -T NN --geometry 80x31+938+0 -e nn

The terminal will start with the proper size, but the size information (lines and columns) is not being passed to the the program (nn or mutt) and it defaults to assuming an 80x24 window size. If the terminal is then resized, the utility will NOT respond to the new size. One forum user suggested that this may be due to a switch to vte3 in the latest release.

Problem #2

As way of background, I do have general problems with my desktop configuration since upgrading to 18.10. I have two monitors and always ran separate desktop managers on each screen. This broke during the upgrade and I cannot get a proper desktop environment on display :0.1. I have reported this as a bug here:

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15116

I have a working desktop running on display :0.0 and have been able to launch Firefox and a couple of xfce4-terminals on display :0.1, but only by setting the DISPLAY variable before the command. For example:

(DISPLAY=:0.1 xfce4-terminal --geometry 80x33+0+47 >/dev/null 2>&1 &)

However, any attempt to use the command line option --display=:0.0 or --display=:0.1 are being ignored. Once I've placed anything on display :0.1, when I launch the command as:

xfce4-terminal -T Mutt --geometry 80x34+938+0 --display=:0.0 --color-bg=#EDF4F0 -e /usr/bin/mutt

the terminal still ends up on display :0.1. The --display option appears to be ignored as I've also noticed with other applications such as Firefox, and thus the need for the trick of setting the DISPLAY environment variable before launching the app. I mention this here because there is some chance that the two option problems may result from the same cause.

Version: 0.8.7.4