10.8.3/Terminal 2.3.
Terminal resizes the entire window in seemingly unpredictable ways whenever I change the size of the font — a frequent operation when frequently going between laptop and external displays.
Is there some way to prevent this? iTerm seems to do the same thing.
Update: Based on @robmathers' answer below, it seems likely that what I want isn't possible. Can anyone recommend any OS X terminal emulators that don't have this feature?
Best Answer
As far as I know, you can't do this in Terminal (I don't use iTerm, so I can't speak to that). The reason is that Terminal's window sizes are defined by characters, rather than pixels. Hence, when you change fonts, the window resizes based on the proportions of that font, so as to preserve the format of the existing content on the screen.
It sounds a bit silly at first, but given that a terminal simply displays only text characters, it makes sense — if a window is sized by pixels, you'd often end up with wasted space when the size of the window doesn't exactly match a character boundary.