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I've recently downloaded the terminator shell however it doesn't seem to re-wrap the text in the console when I resize the window like bash does (i.e. if I increase the size there , how would I enable this or is there a plugin I can download that does it?

Thanks!

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  • Nitpicking: Terminator is a "terminal emulator" (or often "terminal" for short), not a shell. A "shell" is the command line interpreter, such as bash, zsh, fish, tcsh... – egmont Nov 19 '16 at 11:58
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Confusingly there are two terminal emulators out there called Terminator. One is a Java-based, the other is based on Gtk+ and is suited for the GNOME desktop (sometimes this one is also referred to as gnome-terminator). Your link and the tag applied to the question contradicts as for which one you're referring to.

I'll be talking about "gnome-terminator" here, which you can easily recognize by the red header bar.

Terminator, as many other terminal emulators, uses the VTE widget for terminal emulation. Unfortunately, the latest tarball release (0.98 as of writing this) still uses GTK+ version 2, and its corresponding VTE version 0.28 which does not support rewrapping. Rewrapping was implemented in VTE version 0.36 which requires GTK+ v3.

There is a bazaar branch of Terminator that uses GTK+-3 and VTE 0.38 or newer. It's available at https://code.launchpad.net/~gnome-terminator/terminator/gtk3. If you download, compile and install it, you'll get rewrapping along with about a hundred other improvements and fixes.

In the mean time, could you please push the author to releasing a GTK+-3 version? You can do it e.g. at https://bugs.launchpad.net/terminator/+bug/1030562.

Note that Terminator's GTK+-3 branch is not fully release-ready yet, you might encounter a few minor glithces that don't exist in the GTK+-2 branch (see also the aforementioned bugreport for 3 patches that I recommend to apply), but it's in an overall very good state, it'll work pretty nicely.

Update: Terminator version 1.90 is out now based on GTK+-3 and corresponding VTE versions, and as such, supports rewrapping.

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  • Ah brilliant, thanks! - the 'gnome-terminator' version was what I was referring to. I'll have a look at the GTK version and see if I can download it :) – MysteriousWaffle Nov 19 '16 at 12:46
  • To download, first install the "bazaar" aka. "bzr" package of your distribution, and then execute the command from the top of the page I've linked: "bzr branch lp:terminator/gtk3". It'll place it in a new directory called "gtk3" which probably you'll want to rename :) – egmont Nov 19 '16 at 12:52

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