How to disable saved state for pantheon-terminal?

Question

Every time I open a new terminal window it opens on top of the last one I opened. I would like it to be opened in the middle of my screen.

I've tried editing org.pantheon.terminal.saved-state opening-x and opening-y but it only works for the first one I open. Once I position the terminal, the next one opens in that same position.

I'm running Loki.

Thanks.

Answer 1

pantheon-terminal is set to periodically update a saved state variable with your terminal's position. You can flush it out with the following commands:

gsettings reset org.pantheon.terminal.saved-state opening-x

gsettings reset org.pantheon.terminal.saved-state opening-y

but unless you run these right before you open a new window, any additional windows are coded to overlay the original. (One would think that they should at least cascade... I think that's worthy of a bug report.)

Your only other option would be to download and recompile pantheon-terminal while commenting out the lines that recall the positional saved state. This would mean commenting out the following two lines in /src/PantheonTerminalWindow.vala and recompiling as you wish:

    if (restore_pos) {
        int x; # = saved_state.opening_x;
        int y; # = saved_state.opening_y;

        if (x != -1 && y != -1) {
            move (x, y);
        } else {
            x = (Gdk.Screen.width ()  - default_width)  / 2;
            y = (Gdk.Screen.height () - default_height) / 2;
            move (x, y);
        }
    }

A jury-rigged alternative would be to only open Terminal from a custom keyboard shortcut (or link) and to have that shortcut trigger a simple script that resets those two variables and opens another instance of pantheon-terminal. (Let me know if you would like help with that.) The best solution would likely to be filing a bug report so we can see if we can't get this entire function to be toggle-able in org.pantheon.terminal.settings...