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Extra vertical gap above the modeline when using tmux #663
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and the display is aligned as expected: the first line is slightly truncated and the tmux status bar is flush with the modeline.
I don't think this is then "aligned as expected" if the first line is slightly truncated.
That works in screen or tmux but anything with a menubar or a fixed top row (htop, emacs -nw, ...) would then
look like a cut off first row, no?Indeed, for top, emacs -nw, and similar terminal applications, the bug is the other way around! Ideally, I suppose there should be neither a gap at the bottom nor any truncation of the first line. The remaining space would then have to appear as a gap at the top.
@mallet Just as a clarification - the behavior you describe is expected and by design.
tmuxuses alt screen which means that it's essentially a fullscreen app without any scrollback. Ghostel sizes its display so that it fits completely within the window that shows it, which means that unless you have your window perfectly sized Ghostel will not fill up the entire screen since that would give you half visible lines - something you typically don't want in alt-screen apps.A raw bash shell, as in your first example, is a primary screen application which consists of an active area and then scrollback. Everything from the
5and downwards is part of the active area and the4is part of scrollback. When there is scrollback available, Ghostel will align the bottom row to the bottom of the window and allow partial scrollback rows to be shown. This is because in a terminal with scrollback, the content is naturally bottom aligned and doing it this way prevents jittering when resizing. You could say that content gets added at the bottom and flows upward.If there is no scrollback, the the contents will be top aligned since that's where a content naturally aligns in a terminal with a shell - content starts at the top and flow downward, until you start getting scrollback.
So when you use
ceilinginstead offloor, you're incorrectly sizing the terminal window so that it doesn't fit in the window anymore.@dakra made a PR that lets you set the balance of where the padding ends up. You can try that and see if any setting is more to your liking. But just know that the gap at the bottom is normal and expected behavior, it's the difference between primary screen and alt screen, the different between scrollback and no scrollback. And it is also the default of Ghostty proper.
- added 5 commits that reference this issue
on Aug 31, 2026
Ghostel is amazing! But I found what seems to be an incorrect vertical alignment when running tmux.
In a raw Bash shell, there is no gap between the modeline and the prompt. See in the example below how the number 4 is truncated so that the prompt lands perfectly above the modeline. I think this is the proper behavior.
But if I run a tmux instance, a gap appears between the tmux status bar and the modeline. See how the 6 is fully shown. The first line (6, here) is never truncated, because of the spurious gap between the tmux status bar and the modeline. I assume this is not expected, and that the proper behavior would be to remove the gap between the tmux status bar and the modeline, and show a truncated 5.
The analysis of an AI is the following:
If that helps, here is a fix I applied in my Emacs configuration, where
ceilingmakes all the difference:Thanks for the excellent work on this very useful extension!