Affects: oneiric ocelot, precise pangolin
vte which xfce4-terminal is based on has a feature to send an application which is using the alternate screen a few cursor up and down keystrokes when the mouse wheel is activated. Most prominent application is the pager ("more" or "less") and in particular when used by "man" for manpage viewing.
Now not all ncurses applications are happy with that feature, e.g. when running "screen" and a shell inside screen, activating the mouse wheel would scroll the shell history instead. That resulted in a patch to vte (still present in vte3_0.31.0, patches/93_add_alt_screen_scroll_toggle.patch) that made the feature toggle-able. The patch was never accepted upstream.
It also changes the default behaviour by (probably accidentally) setting the feature to off. The result of the patch
simply is an new function that can be called to toggle the feature.
Now every package in ubuntu that uses vte needs a patch to eventually call that new function, otherwise its behaviour will differ from upstream.
gnome terminal does so, the patch is still in precise (patch 20_add_alt_screen_toggle_ui.patch)
xfce4-terminal should as well.
The provided patch will add a "hidden" Property, that can only be set manually be editing ~/.config//Terminal/terminalrc and adding the line
MiscScrollAlternateScreen=TRUE
The old version of my patch made xfce4-terminal segfault when closing the Preferences screen. This version fixes that. The new version also uses a different name because the new version of xfce4-terminal insists on using the "Misc" Prefix for hidden preferences (i.e. not changeable via the GUI) The patch is tested with no ill effects on my desktop and I do use terminals a lot.
Please include this patch into precise, so the LTS release does not suffer from this bug.
The attachment "Make scroll alternate screen toggleable for xfce4-terminal" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.
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