Horizontal/vertical-maximized window shrinks a few pixels when losing focus, upsets gnome-terminal

Sorry, I didn't realize until later that any terminal will do. But you have to generate enough content to start scrolling. Seems like the last line of the window has to have text. Just do a ls or even just hit return until it scrolls.

Then as you gain/lose focus the window will resize by a line and scroll by a line.

So basically unity, terminal, and vertical maximize are broken. Screen is not needed.

This has to do with the padding size in the metacity theme settings. When a window is focused it as a padding of 5 at the bottom. When a window is unfocused it has a padding of 7. I believe the padding is there for the "invisible" resize handles at the bottom, left, and right of a window. As I don't have any need for the "invisible" resize handles (I use Alt + Middle Click) I just set the padding to always be zero.

Confirmed. Here are my original steps to reproduce from a duplicate of this bug:

Use the middle or right mouse buttons to maximize a gnome-terminal window either vertically or horizontally. Now click on the desktop or another window. Notice the gnome-terminal window shrinks by 2-4 pixels in the direction it was maximized.

If you do this with a "full" terminal window (one that has text on every line) and vertically maximize then the vertical shrinkage on loss of focus also causes the terminal text to jump as it has to shrink by a whole line of text to adjust.

Here's a partial solution for bug 772972 and bug 735677.

Functionally it solves the vertical (or horizontal) maximization problems, but it still has a small bug where the window does not redraw into the correct size until refocused.

Yes bededog is right. A good workaround is to edit /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

Just need to change the padding of frame_style to be equal values for name="normal_unfocused" and name="normal_focused". Then change theme to something else and back again to Ambiance to enable the change.

While it looks like a mistake in the Ambiance theme that these padding values are different, it's not really the root cause of the bug. The root cause is a code issue because this invisible padding area is not meant to affect the visible size of the window. You should be able to have any values for padding and the window size should not change magically by itself.

I'm logging the theme bug separately, assuming it is a bug. See bug 786850.

Merged bug 786850 with this one, since the symptoms are the same. And a fix to either light-themes or unity will visibly resolve the bug.

Found the fix has silently been committed on the trunk (without a bug ID):
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-art-pkg/light-themes/trunk/revision/132#Ambiance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

Found the fix has been committed to oneiric (without a bug ID):
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/oneiric/light-themes/oneiric/revision/39

The fix appears to be released for oneiric now:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/0.1.8.19.1

Fix Released (for oneiric) already.

Confirmed: The root cause of this bug is still unity-window-decorator. And that hasn't been fixed yet. We're only hiding the bug by tweaking the settings in light-themes.

(unity-window-decorator is being re-written so we might see it fixed
with the new magic ;)

To clarify, this bug is somewhat different from 735677

The fix was in the grid plugin, well, more of a hack to ignore the forced size limits that some windows have (for example gnome-terminal) through some magic with window manager hooks.

I know this bug is different to bug 735677. It just happened that my hack in comment #5 seemed to solve both bugs (almost).