How can I force gvim in awesome to fill the screen?

Question

I know this is a common problem but I've never found an answer that really works.

When I start up gvim, the following sequence of events takes place:

• GVim window opens
• A rule in my rc.lua sets maximized_vertical and maximized_horizontal, causing the window to fill the screen
• GVim reacts to the change by shrinking to an even number of characters
• ~/.vimrc runs and set guioptions-=m removes the menu bar, further shrinking the window.

There is now a substantial gap below the window. Even re-maximizing it still leaves some gap, though smaller.

Ideally, I would like a way to force the window geometry to be fixed, and not allow GVim to resize the window, no matter how much it wants to (those few times when it's nice for GVim to resize are not worth the times when it's not).

Can this be done?

Answer 1

This is a size hint issue. Add this to rc.lua:

{ rule = { class = "Gvim" }, properties = { size_hints_honor = false } },

I have the same thing done for XTerm and URxvt classes.

Answer 2

Not sure from your description, but you may be having the problem I was... that GVim takes the background color from the GTK theme for the extra space.

Solution that worked for me (from the Arch Wiki), add the following to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "vimfix" {
  bg[NORMAL] = "#242424" # this matches my gvim theme 'Normal' bg color.
}
widget "vim-main-window.*GtkForm" style "vimfix"