How to reflow text in a terminal when you resize? [duplicate]

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

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