Created attachment 72990 [details]
"Screenshot"

Proof image with one area of a multi-tab terminal over another.

Debian bug about the same issue:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=400458

"A gnome-terminal with tabs is wider dan one without tabs (see
screenshot).  This is pretty annoyong if you have terms that line op
nicely without tabs, and the alignmnet is broken after opening a tab
in one of the windows."

In addition to size, this also affects the appearance of a maximized or fullscreen gnome-terminal.  Without tabs, the terminal background color extends to the edge of the screen; with tabs, a border appears at the edge of the screen.

AFAIK, GtkNotebook doesn't allow to hide the border when tabs are shown.

Created attachment 126194 [details]
Screenshot with a border and no tabs

A simple solution to avoid glitches when adding tabs is to always show the border, even when there is no tab. (It looks a bit weird at first sight.)

(In reply to comment #4)
> AFAIK, GtkNotebook doesn't allow to hide the border when tabs are shown.

That's the gtk+ bug this depends on, bug 123408.

Created attachment 126195 [details] [review]
Add an option in the View menu to always show tabs

A step further, to avoid any window resizing when adding tabs, is to always show them (but that should be up to the user).

Always showing tabs is bug 78776.

Mea culpa.

(In reply to comment #5)
> Created an attachment (id=126194) [edit]
> Screenshot with a border and no tabs
> 
> A simple solution to avoid glitches when adding tabs is to always show the
> border, even when there is no tab. (It looks a bit weird at first sight.)

Ick, please don't do this.  "consistently takes up extra space and doesn't look good" doesn't seem like an improvement over "sometimes takes up extra space and doesn't look good". :)

As a workaround, I've started using the following in my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 , which works just fine:

style "notebook-borderless" = "default"
{
    xthickness = 0
    ythickness = 0
}
widget "TerminalWindow.*.GtkNotebook" style "notebook-borderless"


However, I'd still like to see gnome-terminal avoid the borders by default.

GNOME Terminal could ship with such a gtkrc snippet for the Raleigh theme and parse something like $(datadir)/gnome-terminal/themes/<theme-name>/gtkrc. That would make it quite easy to hook up theme changes and properly let theme developers apply useful styles there.

Opinions?

If you want to invest any time in a fix for this, I'd suggest to fix the gtk+ bug instead of adding workarounds to apps.

*** Bug 615215 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This was workarounded in the default gnome theme (adwaita); closing.