Ubuntu – Terminal flashing between current and previous screen

14.04bashcommand line

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04. After upgrading the terminal will sometimes, but not always, flash between the current screen and the previous screen. Here are some examples:

  1. The output of an 'ls' command will flash on and off the screen.
  2. But when I press enter to start a new line, sometimes–but not always–the output of ls will stop flashing and instead the newline will begin flashing.
  3. Sometimes vim will start flashing between the current place and a previous place, such as right after a search.
  4. This also happens when I opened just sh within a bash terminal. (I was hoping the issue was just with my .bashrc, though I haven't changed it in months and didn't have any issues in 12.04.)

This is incredibly annoying, and has made the terminal essentially unusable.Unfortunately, google-ing for a half hour hasn't shown anyone running into similar problems, either on 14.04, other versions of ubuntu,or other versions of linux.

UPDATE: I'm not sure if this helps identify the problem, but the text stopped blinking when I turned the cursor blinking off using these instructions How do I disable the blinking cursor in gnome-terminal?. However the problem isn't totally fixed because now the text will disappear for a moment when I type.

Best Answer

It's possible this is a compiz/nvidia bug.

I noticed very similar "screen flashing" that seemed tied to screen redraws, e.g. chunks of the screen would redraw strangely as the cursor blinked, or if I turned off the blinking cursor, would just fail to redraw at the right time.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1314367/ describes the following workaround:

To fix it, you get CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm) and you go down to "Workarounds" in the "Utility" Category and check the box that says "Force full screen redraws (buffer swap) on repaint".

...which seems to have worked for me. At least for now.

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