Ubuntu – Windows CMD for Linux

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.

Most terminals (at least gnome-terminal, urxvt, and XTerm, for example) that are started within a desktop environment such as Unity will use the SHELL environment variable to select the shell when they are launched.

SHELL should automatically be set to your default shell listed in /etc/passwd, but the variable can be overwritten when you log in. Make sure you have not set SHELL=/bin/bash or something similar in a file that will affect your entire desktop session. Such files include:

• ~/.profile
• ~/.pam_environment
• /etc/environment
• maybe some other files edited by Ubuntu users less often, such as /etc/profile

Additionally if any scripts such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile are called by those other startup files and there is an export SHELL=/bin/bash line, that will also affect the entire desktop session.

I know it's acceptable/encouraged, but I still hate answering my own question. Nevertheless, this may be of some use to someone in the future. Thanks to @heemayl and @muru for helping me investigate.