About "white flashes" when a new frame is created

About "white flashes" when a new frame is created

[Andrea Cardaci]

Hi,

this isn't a bug report, I don't even know if this is an issue with Emacs
itself, but since it does not happen with other applications I decided to
ask here for some pointers about it. I was hoping that the patch by Daniel
Colascione [1] would addressed this issue too.

So here's the fact, when a new frame is created (whether it's a new Emacs
instance, C-x 5 2 or emacsclient) I notice that the window is initially
created white then painted according to the theme. Since my desktop setup
is mostly white this is quite annoying.

Please note that it's not a matter with Xresources as I managed to match
the X resources entities with the values from my Emacs theme (background,
no menu, no scrollbars, etc.) so to minimize any transitions. Here is what
I mean:

emacs.menuBar: off
emacs.toolBar: off
emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
emacs.background: #000000

Now, it is entirely possible that this is an issue with the window manager
(i3), but as I said this only happens with Emacs. In particular it doesn't
happen with rxvt, which has a black background too.

So I was wondering if someone else is experiencing this. Please let me know
if you need more details about my environment. I'm using Emacs straight
from the master branch (03de82fe7ca09ab40fbcae394d4fcdfe3374496e), but the
same happens with version 24 from the Debian Jessie repo.

Many thanks in advance,


Andrea

[1]:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=c29071587c64efb30792bd72248d3c791abd9337

Re: About "white flashes" when a new frame is created

[Ernest Adrogué]

2017-01-28, 14:36 (+0000); Andrea Cardaci escriu:
> Hi,
> 
> this isn't a bug report, I don't even know if this is an issue with Emacs
> itself, but since it does not happen with other applications I decided to
> ask here for some pointers about it. I was hoping that the patch by Daniel
> Colascione [1] would addressed this issue too.
> 
> So here's the fact, when a new frame is created (whether it's a new Emacs
> instance, C-x 5 2 or emacsclient) I notice that the window is initially
> created white then painted according to the theme. Since my desktop setup
> is mostly white this is quite annoying.
> 
> Please note that it's not a matter with Xresources as I managed to match
> the X resources entities with the values from my Emacs theme (background,
> no menu, no scrollbars, etc.) so to minimize any transitions. Here is what
> I mean:
> 
> emacs.menuBar: off
> emacs.toolBar: off
> emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
> emacs.background: #000000
> 
> Now, it is entirely possible that this is an issue with the window manager
> (i3), but as I said this only happens with Emacs. In particular it doesn't
> happen with rxvt, which has a black background too.
> 
> So I was wondering if someone else is experiencing this. Please let me know
> if you need more details about my environment. I'm using Emacs straight
> from the master branch (03de82fe7ca09ab40fbcae394d4fcdfe3374496e), but the
> same happens with version 24 from the Debian Jessie repo.

No white flash, but I do see a black flash for a couple of milliseconds.
All GTK3 programs do it though, so it's not an Emacs issue.

Cheers.

Re: About "white flashes" when a new frame is created

[Bob Proulx]

Andrea Cardaci wrote:
> Now, it is entirely possible that this is an issue with the window manager
> (i3), but as I said this only happens with Emacs. In particular it doesn't
> happen with rxvt, which has a black background too.

rxvt in Debian Jessie uses libx11 not GTK.  If what you are seeing is
a GTK artifact then rxvt won't experience it.

> So I was wondering if someone else is experiencing this. Please let me know
> if you need more details about my environment. I'm using Emacs straight
> from the master branch (03de82fe7ca09ab40fbcae394d4fcdfe3374496e), but the
> same happens with version 24 from the Debian Jessie repo.

I am not experiencing this using a Debian Jessie stock install of the
emacs24-lucid package.  It uses the Lucid toolkit instead of GTK.  You
might give it an install and test to see if it flashes for you or
not.  I find the Lucid emacs avoids some annoyances of the GTK emacs
and therefore it is the normal one for me.

Bob

Re: About "white flashes" when a new frame is created

[Andrea Cardaci]

Hi Bob,

thanks, you pointed me into the right direction. It turned out that this is
a GTK "issue" and it does not happen with the Lucid toolkit.

Moreover I figured out how to fix this behavior in the GTK version, it does
not avoid the artifacts, rather it makes them the same color as the
background. As per [1] I added the following in `~/.emacs.d/gtkrc`:

style "default"
{
    bg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
    # ...
}

I've always considered the Lucid toolkit to be the *ancient* version,
superseded by GTK, also considering its unspeakably ugly widgets (I do not
use menus and dialogs normally, but they happen to pop up in certain
circumstances); but maybe it is not this way...


Cheers,

Andrea

[1]:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/GTK-styles.html#GTK-styles

On Mon, 30 Jan 2017 at 00:22 Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

Andrea Cardaci wrote:
> Now, it is entirely possible that this is an issue with the window manager
> (i3), but as I said this only happens with Emacs. In particular it doesn't
> happen with rxvt, which has a black background too.

rxvt in Debian Jessie uses libx11 not GTK.  If what you are seeing is
a GTK artifact then rxvt won't experience it.

> So I was wondering if someone else is experiencing this. Please let me
know
> if you need more details about my environment. I'm using Emacs straight
> from the master branch (03de82fe7ca09ab40fbcae394d4fcdfe3374496e), but the
> same happens with version 24 from the Debian Jessie repo.

I am not experiencing this using a Debian Jessie stock install of the
emacs24-lucid package.  It uses the Lucid toolkit instead of GTK.  You
might give it an install and test to see if it flashes for you or
not.  I find the Lucid emacs avoids some annoyances of the GTK emacs
and therefore it is the normal one for me.

Bob