X11’s WM_NORMAL_HINTS property is a property that can be set on a window. Part of that property is width_inc and height_inc. They tell the window manager to only increase/decrease a window’s size by certain steps.

Terminal emulators like to set these values to the font size, so that when you resize the window the size “snaps” to the next increment and the terminal widget fits exactly into the window. It’s a bit hard to explain for me, so here’s a demonstration:

https://movq.de/v/7909ebc08a/st.mp4

That’s the st terminal.

It appears, Wayland does not have something like WM_NORMAL_HINTS, so this functionality has been removed from GTK 3. (You can still set this property on your window, but it’s convoluted and not part of the GTK toolkit, i.e. you have to use Xlib yourself. That makes everything very awkward.)

Hence in xiate, it looks like this:

https://movq.de/v/7909ebc08a/xiate.mp4

I kind of got used to that over time, but now that I use st every now and then, I realize how ugly and annoying xiate’s behaviour is. 🫤