bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Roshan Shariff]

This bug appears on Linux with the Xorg and Xwayland servers, and I've
tested it on Gnome 45.  To reproduce

$ emacs -Q --eval='(menu-bar-mode -1)'
Invoke make-frame-command (C-x 5 2)

The initial frame is correctly sized, but any new frames are very small.
The frame-parameter function reports their size to be 22x10.  Evaluating
(set-frame-size nil 80 40) in the newly created frame does resize it
correctly, and adding that code to after-make-frame-functions works
around this bug.  Re-enabling the menu bar also makes new frames
correctly sized.

The same problem happens in daemon mode.  If the menu bar is disabled
with emacsclient -e '(menu-bar-mode -1)' immediately after starting the
daemon, the first frame created via emacsclient -c is correctly sized
but all subsequent frames are tiny.

I was able to find similar reports on the Emacs StackExchange site:
https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/77667/emacs-starts-in-extremely-tiny-window


In GNU Emacs 29.1 (build 1, x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version
 3.24.38, cairo version 1.17.8) of 2023-09-24 built on
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Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12302002
System Description: Fedora Linux 39 (Workstation Edition)

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bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Roshan Shariff]

I found that this bug occurs regardless of menu-bar-mode when I'm
running without 2x desktop scaling, tested at 1920x1080 or 3840x2160
screen resolutions. In those cases, all newly created frames are tiny
regardless of whether menu-bar-mode is enabled or not.

The correlation with menu-bar-mode happens only when running at 2x
scaling with 3840x2160 resolution.

I was also able to reproduce this bug in a freshly installed Fedora 39
virtual machine, with emacs 29.1 from the distribution repository. I
also noted that the emacs-lucid build doesn't suffer from this issue,
only the GTK build.

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

Roshan Shariff <roshan.shariff@gmail.com> writes:

> I found that this bug occurs regardless of menu-bar-mode when I'm
> running without 2x desktop scaling, tested at 1920x1080 or 3840x2160
> screen resolutions. In those cases, all newly created frames are tiny
> regardless of whether menu-bar-mode is enabled or not.
>
> The correlation with menu-bar-mode happens only when running at 2x
> scaling with 3840x2160 resolution.
>
> I was also able to reproduce this bug in a freshly installed Fedora 39
> virtual machine, with emacs 29.1 from the distribution repository. I
> also noted that the emacs-lucid build doesn't suffer from this issue,
> only the GTK build.

Yes, I'm aware of this problem.  But I've never successfully reproduced
it myself, and the GTK build is not important to me, so my
recommendation is to use some other build, preferably the no toolkit
one.

Let's leave this bug open for now, on the off chance a good Samaritan
devises a fix.

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: 67654@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:33:59 +0800
> From:  Po Lu via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> Roshan Shariff <roshan.shariff@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I found that this bug occurs regardless of menu-bar-mode when I'm
> > running without 2x desktop scaling, tested at 1920x1080 or 3840x2160
> > screen resolutions. In those cases, all newly created frames are tiny
> > regardless of whether menu-bar-mode is enabled or not.
> >
> > The correlation with menu-bar-mode happens only when running at 2x
> > scaling with 3840x2160 resolution.
> >
> > I was also able to reproduce this bug in a freshly installed Fedora 39
> > virtual machine, with emacs 29.1 from the distribution repository. I
> > also noted that the emacs-lucid build doesn't suffer from this issue,
> > only the GTK build.
> 
> Yes, I'm aware of this problem.  But I've never successfully reproduced
> it myself, and the GTK build is not important to me, so my
> recommendation is to use some other build, preferably the no toolkit
> one.
> 
> Let's leave this bug open for now, on the off chance a good Samaritan
> devises a fix.

Did this problem exist in Emacs 28?  If not, we should at least try
understanding what changes triggered it in Emacs 29.

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Roshan Shariff]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2023 at 05:39, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> Did this problem exist in Emacs 28?  If not, we should at least try
> understanding what changes triggered it in Emacs 29.

The same problem existed on Emacs 28, but at the time I wasn't able to
narrow it down and come up with a consistent reproducer. I don't
remember if Emacs 27 had it too. When I have some time, I'll test
those older versions and see if git bisect can narrow down when the
bug appeared.

Also, I just came across bug #65559 which might be the same issue,
mentioned in https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/77667/emacs-starts-in-extremely-tiny-window

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Roshan Shariff]

I tried a git bisect only to find that commits as far back as ~2015
exhibit the bug; I wasn't able to compile older versions on my system
because of segfaults during compilation. So it seems plausible that
the GTK3 build of Emacs has always had this issue.

While coming up with a workaround (see below) I noticed something odd.
I added a hook to after-make-frame-functions that prints out the
frame-{char,native,text,outer}-{width,height} of the newly created
frame. I found that immediately after the frame is created, these
values are fine. But when printing them out after a brief sleep-for,
or using run-with-timer, the values actually match the size of the
tiny frame. So it seems that Emacs thinks the frame has the correct
size on creation, but learns of its actual size a little bit later.

The following workaround needs the run-with-timer (and the duration
needs to be long enough):

(add-hook 'after-make-frame-functions
   (defun +resize-after-make-frame (frame)
     ;; HACK Resize new frames shortly after creation.  Works around
     ;; https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=67654
     (when-let ((width (alist-get 'width default-frame-alist))
                (height (alist-get 'height default-frame-alist)))
       (run-with-timer (/ 1.0 60) nil #'set-frame-size frame width height))))

I figure there's little chance of finding the root cause, but
hopefully the workaround will help people who come across this.

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

Roshan Shariff <roshan.shariff@gmail.com> writes:

> I tried a git bisect only to find that commits as far back as ~2015
> exhibit the bug; I wasn't able to compile older versions on my system
> because of segfaults during compilation. So it seems plausible that
> the GTK3 build of Emacs has always had this issue.

It's much more plausible that some change to GTK has introduced this
bug... so much for breaking changes not being made to GTK 3.

Every minute spent on this senseless wild goose chase at the behest of a
cabal of toolkit developers avowedly hostile to us, as they have
expressed time and again, is a minute gone to waste.  Not to say that
nobody will, but I don't see myself entering this chase.  Patches
welcome as usual, and thanks in advance.

If the no toolkit, Lucid, Motif, or GTK+ 2.x builds don't suffer this
problem, it'd be prudent to use one of those instead, and forget this
bug happened.

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  67654@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:37:49 +0800
> 
> Roshan Shariff <roshan.shariff@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I tried a git bisect only to find that commits as far back as ~2015
> > exhibit the bug; I wasn't able to compile older versions on my system
> > because of segfaults during compilation. So it seems plausible that
> > the GTK3 build of Emacs has always had this issue.
> 
> It's much more plausible that some change to GTK has introduced this
> bug... so much for breaking changes not being made to GTK 3.

Sounds like some GTK setting gets in the way and changes the
dimensions?

If the OP wanted to look deeper into this problem, would it be
possible to provide instructions where to look and which variables or
events to examine?

bug#67654: 29.1; Hiding menu bar makes new frames very small

[Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Sounds like some GTK setting gets in the way and changes the
> dimensions?
>
> If the OP wanted to look deeper into this problem, would it be
> possible to provide instructions where to look and which variables or
> events to examine?

I'm not certain.  I would suggest downgrading GTK in increments, and
searching through its ChangeLog for each release between the first to
function correctly and the one installed for possibly related changes.

Since we've never received these reports before roughly the release of
Emacs 29.1, there shouldn't be too many versions to work through.  It's
allegedly in "maintainence mode" after all.

bug#67654:

[Paul Zinn-Justin]

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if that can help: I have the same problem about half the time, and each
time the window starts tiny, I have the following error message in the
terminal:
(emacs:6163): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 00:03:35.971:
gtk_distribute_natural_allocation: assertion 'extra_space >= 0' failed

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