Bug 328161

Summary:	Konsole will no longer resize ncurses terminal progams (less, man, htop, minicom) correctly
Product:	[Applications] konsole	Reporter:	Andrew M <quantumphazor>
Component:	emulation	Assignee:	Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal	CC:	brian, cfeck, chgonzalezg, kde, travisgevans
Priority:	NOR
Version:	2.11.3
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Arch Linux
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Andrew M 2013-11-28 02:56:02 UTC

Konsole used to resize ncurses based apps like htop, less, man and minicom correctly in 2.11.2 (KDE 4.11.2) but no longer does in 2.11.3.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open 2 Konsole windows
2. Run ncurses app like htop on both windows
3. Make the window larger on one, then make it smaller
4. Make the window smaller on the second one, then make is bigger
5. Compare the behaviout to konsole-2.11.2
Actual Results:  
The bar graphs, process list and pretty much everything gets corrupted when shrinking it
The content does not resize when growing it

Expected Results:  
The htop window should change to have the F-key bar at the bottom and trim the Command column to fit in the window

2.11.3 tested on Arch Linux
2.11.2 worked fine, tested on Kubuntu 13.11
Applications seem to change to the new size if you quit them and restart them.

Comment 1 Christoph Feck 2013-11-28 11:08:22 UTC

Interestingly, there are no changes in Konsole between 4.11.2 and 4.11.3, except for the version change. Could you find out if your systems have other differences?

Comment 2 Andrew M 2013-11-28 12:05:01 UTC

I have just tried another system running Arch Linux with 4.11.3 and the problem is not there. I think there may be something wrong with my laptop's configuration.

The strange thing is that it only effects some terminal emulators. Furthur testing shows Xterm, xfce4-terminal and Yakuake are not effected, even though I believe Yakuake uses the same kpart as Konsole. Konsole, LXTerminal and rxvt are effected. Tmux also seems to have the problem (split the window and resize it with C-b % and C-b " then C-b, Alt-<arrow keys>).
I have not tried any others yet, but I think it's safe to conclude it's not a Konsole bug but a deeper problem that is effecting my laptop, but not my desktop.
I tried a new user with a clean ~/.kde4 and the problem persists.

I suppose you can mark this as invalid. At least it's now googleable and some other poor chump with the same problem can see this and find no solution :P

Comment 3 Christoph Feck 2013-11-28 12:50:29 UTC

Thanks for the update. If you found a solution, you could add a comment here, too.

Comment 4 Travis Evans 2013-12-07 02:00:27 UTC

I'm seeing this sometimes, too, on an Arch system. It seems that somehow, sometimes on system startup, programs launched from plasma are unable to catch SIGWINCH, including Konsole and xterm started from an affected Konsole. Strangely, if I start them through another method (kstart or kdeinit?), it would work fine. It's not always reproducible; I can't seem to reproduce it at the moment, and it only occurs sometimes, but apparently in my case, something is somehow causing SIGWINCH to be blocked sometimes when these apps are launched.

Comment 5 kde 2014-01-15 03:33:59 UTC

I can confirm this under Slackware64-current using 4.12.1. Starting using krunner or the launcher (probably as Travis says, anything Plasma) causes konsole to suffer from the ncurses resize problem. If I start konsole another way, it behaves normally.

I noticed that Yakuake doesn't suffer from this issue no matter how I start it.