When using twm as a window manager, the --geometry setting fails to set the window position of gnome-terminal on startup. For example: gnome-terminal --geometry=80x25+0+0 should result in a new window being placed in the upper left hand corner of the screen without twm stealing mouse focus to place the window. Instead, gnome-terminal fails to send the geometry settings to X and twm requires the user to manually place the window. For reference: xterm -geometry 80x25+0+0 results in the correct behaviour.
gnome-terminal doesn't set the USPosition hint, so with window managers that ignore PPosition --geometry doesn't work.
I'm using gnome-terminal from gnome-core-1.4.0.4-38 under an updated 7.2 i386. The manual (gnome-help:///usr/share/gnome/help/gnome-terminal/C/gnome-terminal.sgml?options) says: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --geometry GEOMETRY Specifies the startup geometry for this terminal. The geometry specifies the desired width and height in terminal characters. For example: --geometry=80x40 will create an eighty-column by forty-line terminal. You can also specify the location of the terminal window on the screen; for example, --geometry=80x40+100+200 will create a window whose top left corner is 100 pixels to the right and 200 pixels down from the top left corner of the screen, while --geometry=80x40+100-200 will give a window whose bottom left corner is 100 pixels to the right and 200 pixels up from the bootm left corner of the screen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why is there an "=" sign in the examples but not in the syntax? When called with: gnome-terminal --use-factory --geometry=80x12+0+680 --tclass right -t "Message Log" -x tailf /var/log/debug gnome-terminal creates a terminal class "80x12+0+680" with some default settings and some settings of the requested tclass. For example, colors are defaulted but scrollbar placement is not. Without the "=" sign, behavior is correct. I suspect this bug is somehow bypassing the geometry specification and setting a new terminal class instead. Three things need to be done: 1. lose the "=" in the docs 2. generate a syntax error if there is an "=" after the --geometry 3. track down the weirdness that turns the geometry spec into a tclass! --jh--
For GNOME 2 I did a reworking of gnome-terminal so that this stuff works correctly. For the most part it's pretty hard to fix in GNOME 1, and only release-critical showstoppers are being fixed in GNOME 1 at this point. So we'll get the fix with GNOME 2.