I posted to the xfce4-dev project list back in June of 2009 that I was messing around adding support for horizontal scrolling of text to the Terminal application.  Every once in a while I want to view console output that doesn't respect sensible terminal output guidelines, and when I went looking for linux terminal apps that could do this, I didn't find any desirable solutions.  I decided to add what I needed to 'Terminal'.  I'd like some insight into whether there's any interest in having me contribute the changes I made back up to the project.  Now I'll describe what I did...

The primary change was adding support for horizontal scrolling.  I did this by enabling newly output text to wrap at a specified logical column boundary instead of always at the edge of the window.  I added a section in the gui preferences menu for 'Horizontal Scrolling', and provided the following simple controls: Enabling/Disabling of scrolling (by wrapping newly output text at the window edge vs the specified boundary); Horizontal Scrollbar placement (Disabled/Top/Bottom) to mirror the vertical scrollbar controls, and a Spin Button allowing entry of a 'logical column' numeric value.

In addition, I made several other enhancements to allow me to use these changes more efficiently.  My desired use case was to have an excessive amount of Terminal windows open, across lots of virtual desktops (as I always seem to end up with).  I wanted all of these using the standard, global  TerminalPreferences.  Then, I wanted a few non-conforming, custom Terminal sessions tailored to unique applications (special titles, special appearance, and of course horizontal scrolling).  The code in terminal-preferences keeping the preferences in sync (storing & monitoring) was preventing this.  What I did was enable an 'extension' (for lack of a better word) of the 'disable-server' option.  I called it 'instance-prefs' and it also 'disables' dbus session launchesas well as disabling preference file storing & monitoring, for that Terminal session (after it loads the settings initially).  Then I added three command line options to: list; get and set preferences (properties on the TerminalPreferences object).  Setting of preferences occurs after the initial load from the xfce config file.  Effectively, this enables a Terminal session to be invoked with arguments customizing preferences (as if they were stored) and using them for the life of the session without affecting other sessions.

I spent the weekend reworking my changes into a local copy of the 0.4.5 code (as I originally had done them in 0.2.12).  I've still got some tidying up to do, but it's close.

If any of this sounds remotely interesting, I'd be happy to talk about it.  If it seems like it's worth something to somebody besides myself I'll setup a git dev branch.