Christian Persch

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Christian Persch is a maintainer and developer of GNOME Terminal, a terminal emulator often bundled with Linux distributions. He is known for deliberately breaking the "select all" feature in 2020, following by refusing to fix it for years.

The "select all" scandal

Normally, the "select all" feature would do what its name says, selecting the entire scroll-back buffer of text in the terminal. But in 2020, a bug was found where selecting many millions of characters of text would cause the terminal emulator to crash.

As a remedy, the brain of gnome-terminal developer Christian Persch spawned a "brilliant idea": Limiting the "Select all" feature to selecting ... how much do you guess? Half a megabyte? A tenth of a megabyte? No. Only the tiny little portion of text that is visible on screen!

In other words, Persch made the "Select all" option useless. After pressing "Select all", it appeared as if everything was selected, but once you scrolled up, nothing beyond what was visible was selected, even though having megabytes of text in a terminal is a rare occurance, and a more reasonable limit would have been something that doesn't cause a crash like a few hundred kilobytes of text.

As you might have guessed, Persch refused to add an option for changing it back.

Until then, it will not be reverted, nor will I introduce a pref for this.

This is where the decision got sideways (always IMHO, anyway). Breaking the complete feature for more than a year, made it from a very understandable decision, into a very bad one, to be honest. Publishing an official release, at all, with this change, was an outright mistake.

Now this breakage got into the release of Ubuntu 22.04, a Long Term Support version, so we'll have a nice, broken build of Gnome Terminal for the years to come. I guess other distros will have included this too in their release cycle.

By solving a minor problem that rarely ever occurs, Christian Persch created a major problem that often occurs. The bug made it into stable releases of major Linux distributions.^[1]

He could have scrapped it altogether and it would hardly made a difference.

But you're lucky you are not confined to his buggy garbage! There is an alternative by KDE: Konsole! And yes, it comes with a "select all" button that actually works!

References

External links

Relevant bug tickets:

• 2520
• 288
• 2504
• 7858

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