Comment 23 for bug 358796

I can confirm that the problem persists in oneiric with xfce4-terminal 0.4.8-1.
However applying my old patch to the current source and installing the result
fixed the problem for me.

To recap:
1) Ubuntu compiles libvte (Source package vte) with some patches,
one of them is the 93_add_alt_screen_scroll_toggle.patch, which makes the
"scroll alternate screen with mouse"-feature runtime configurable. In upstream,
the feature is always on, this patch makes it off by default but the feature can
be turned on by an appropriate method

2) xfce4-terminal in oneiric (0.4.8-1) comes without any patches to upstream.
As upstream does not use a patched vte, they of course did not merge ubuntus
fix for the alternat screen scroll.

3) Applying my patch below adds a hidden
(i.e. can not be set by GUI controls) configuration item
ScrollingAlternateScreen, so entering the line
ScrollingAlternateScreen=TRUE
in ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc will tell xfce4-terminal to switch the scroll
alternate screen feature on.

4) Apparently xfce4-terminal reconfigures itself when ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc
is edited while it is running, so I can confirm that entering the line with FALSE will
switch off alternate screen scrolling and reverting back to TRUE switches it on
again. The feature can easily by tested by using less as a pager, then calling
man bash (or any sufficiently long manpage) and activating the scroll wheel in
the window.

IMHO, the vte patch 93_add_alt_screen_scroll_toggle.patch is done wrong: Making
an upstream feature (alternate screen scroll) configurable may be a good idea, some
people may not like it, so it's a matter of personal preferences. But making it
switched off be default, and by that changing all applications (terminal emulators) that
depend on the lib is clearly wrong.