Dynamic line wrapping in the GNOME Terminal

Solution 1:

At the time the question was asked, this was not possible in Gnome Terminal. However, a fix was committed in late 2013. This change didn't make it into Ubuntu 14.04, but it should be part of Ubuntu 14.10.

According to the issue on Launchpad, you can have this feature today by enabling the Gnome-team PPA. You can activate the Gnome-team Staging PPA (staging required to get latest version) by doing the following

 sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging

Update your sources

sudo apt-get update

Re-install gnome-terminal to get latest version

sudo apt-get install gnome-terminal

Check so you have version 3.13 or later (as of 10 September, should be 3.13.1)

$ gnome-terminal --version
GNOME Terminal 3.12.1

Solution 2:

The default Gnome Terminal doesnt allow you to do this - however, if whilst in the terminal you type screen - it will run the terminal in a terminal emulator which does resize correctly.

For example - here is my home folder whilst running ls -l

and here is the same screen resized horizontally

Starting Gnome-Terminal automatically with Screen

cp /usr/share/applications/gnome-terminal.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

then edit the gnome-terminal.desktop file and change the Exec command line to:

Exec=gnome-terminal -x screen -q

Solution 3:

I'm making great progress in implementing rewrapping in VTE (gnome-terminal etc.). Please see the upstream bug at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336238 , feel free to try my patch if you're a hacker kind. In case of any technical feedback, please comment in that upstream bug, thanks! Hopefully my work will soon end up in mainstream VTE.

Solution 4:

gnome-terminal can't do it (upstream bug).

After some experimentation, rxvt-unicode seems like it will work.

sudo apt-get install rxvt-unicode

The reflowing only works after you have enough text to fill up an entire screen's worth, aka once you hit the scrollback buffer.

On a personal note, I find rxvt to be quite ugly, but if reflowing is more important to you, go for it.