Blog: This week in KWin

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 28. Oktober 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This Week in KWin (2012, week 40-43)

First of all I want to say sorry for not providing an update for the last few weeks, which makes this post more a “This month in KWin” than a “This week in KWin”. There are many reasons why I haven’t provided an update, one of them is that not that much has happened, as new features were merged in just this week and given that 4.9 has been out for quite some time not so many new bugs are reported.

Since Thursday we are in soft feature freeze, which means that only features listed in the Planned Feature Document are allowed to enter master. And there are quite a few nice additions which went into master lately. We have two new effects: one to animate when a mouse click has been performed. It’s a really nice effect especially for screen casts. The other one is a small JavaScript effect which animates the maximize window state change. If you don’t want to wait till 4.10 for this effect: it’s compatible with 4.9 and can be    downloaded  .

This brings me to the next topic: finally the categories on kde-look.org for our new scripted elements have been created which means we get GHNS integration. Luckily I prepared the code for Scripts and Window Switcher Layouts for 4.9 and the download button was just visually hidden. Now that the integration works, I pushed a change for 4.9.3 to show the button. For scripted effects this had not been prepared, but GHNS integration will be available in 4.10.

Given that GHNS for effects works and I really want to see many effects being developed, I was finally forced to create the API documentation. Tutorials will be added sometime soon, also including how to write C++ effects, my old tutorial is no longer up to date at all.

Bug Fixes - New Features - Tasks here

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 11. November 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012 week 44, 45)

The last two weeks have been very important in the KWin development area. First there was the release of 4.9.3 which includes a very important performance bug fix for Mesa 9.0 Intel users. If you had problems please consider an upgrade.

On Thursday we had the hard feature freeze and many features got merged in during that period. Bellegarde Cédric merged in the appmenu support, allowing to have the window’s menu inside the window decoration. I love it as it’s very clean and I hardly use the menu in any application.

Fredrik merged in the initial port from XLib to XCB. This is an important step on the road towards Qt 5 support inside KWin and will probably require still quite some work during the 4.11 cycle.

Casian Andrei’s Google Summer of Code project on color correction got merged in as well. Unfortunately the merge did not go well, so there is still some work to do before the beta release. I hope that I can point to some documentation how to setup a color corrected system very soon.

We have received a nice performance improvement for moving windows when using compositing. This should help alleviating some choppiness when using vsync.

I merged in an improvement to window decorations, so that they can inform the compositor when they are not translucent. This improves the situation for rendering e.g. a maximized window with Oxygen but is most important for the new Plastik QML decoration which is not using translucency at all.

Due to so much going on during these two weeks I’m sure that I have forgotten to mention something important. This could be summarized as “I don’t like feature freezes” – it’s so un-git.

Summary
Bug Fixes

    308633: Window tab group separated in shaded windows
  
    308759: Forgotten “${…}” witihin CMakeLists.txt
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    
New Features

    102607: Display application menu and title bar side by side for maximized windows
    This change will be available in version 4.10
  
    296773: GHNS support for Scripted Effects
    This change will be available in version 4.10
 
    308995: Support shortened titles like in bespin in all decorations
    This change will be available in version 4.10
 
    308990: Animate Window Maximize/Restore
    This change will be available in version 4.10
 
    266596: Add support for appmenu-qt
    This change will be available in version 4.10

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/11/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-44-45/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 3.December 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (week 46 to 48)

Over the last weeks the beta phase for 4.10 has started which means we have more bugs being reported and more bug fixes. Overall given the large amount of changes which might have broken (switch to KConfigXT, refactoring work in the compositor, xcb), it looks rather good.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    310658: kwin Crash when setting “No border.”

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    264041: “Switch to Screen” shortcuts are broken when using three or more monitors.

    310646: No animations in the CoverSwitch effect
    This change will be available in version 4.10 Beta 2
 
    309510: Logout Desaturation Desktop Effect no longer works correctly
    309170: If a windows is fullscreen the quick (un)maximizing is triggered when Alt+click moving it

    276391: Desktop zoom shows wrong mousecursor while resizing window

    309960: HTML in window titles not escaped in tabbox
    This change will be available in version 4.9.4

    310613: Rendering of window decoration preview is broken/rendered white/partial
    This change will be available in version 4.10 Beta 2

    309647: KWin uses incorrect function prototype for glXSwapInterval

    309765: Closing a tabbed window gives focus to an other, but doesn’t raise that

    310363: problem with extendedWindowBorders and dragAndDrop

New Features

    307721: Make use of KDecorationDefines::ExtendedBorderRegion in shipped decorations

    308994: Move ExtendedBorderRegion to stable API
    This change will be available in version 4.10

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/12/this-week-in-kwin-week-46-to-48/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 20.December 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

The road towards KWin on Qt 5

For me the conference was very valuable as I had the chance to discuss a few things about the next versions of our KDE workspaces with Aaron and David. And even if we do not yet have plans for a KDE workspaces release based on Qt 5 and KF 5 it became clear to me that my work for the 4.11 cycle will be mostly focused around the porting to Qt 5. This might sound surprising given that Qt promises 99 % source code compatibility. Well Lars Knoll mentioned that only platform dependent code needs to be adjusted and yeah: KWin is the 1 %. I will start to document lots of the tasks which need to be done in our wiki and will blog about it so that you can help with this task. A good example is that QPixmap is no longer bound to an X11 pixmap and well we used to do texture from pixmap from it (only with X11 PaintEngine in Qt).

Personally I do not mind much that we have to spend time porting to Qt 5. It gives us the opportunity to improve a few areas where we kept methods around for backwards compatibility in e.g. the D-Bus interfaces.

Such methods are already marked as deprecated and some of them had been marked as “Should be removed with KDE 4″. It seems to me like the needed cleanup had been forgotten when we last had the chance. And that’s why I want to get done with the porting early. I would prefer having KWin run on top of Qt 5 as of 4.11 (of course that release will still be Qt 4 based) so that we can spend the 4.12 cycle to do lots of the cleanup.

One of the major areas for porting is the switch from XLib to XCB. As far as I have seen we would not be required to port everything to XCB, but overall it is a good idea to do so.

Full blog

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 28 December 2012 (the land of wobbly windows)

Help KWin] Save the Explosion Effect

One of our KWin Effects hasn’t seen much love over the last years and is in fact more broken than working. It’s a pure eye-candy effect which means that it is not at all in the development focus of the KWin team. The truth is, that we are tempted to just delete the effect because we won’t fix it. But of course there are users who like it and would be sad if it gets deleted.

Here you can help: if the issues gets fixed and the effect becomes maintained there is no need to remove it. So if you want to get your hands dirty with a small OpenGL based effect have a look at the Explosion effect and improve it. Have a look at  Bug 312176 - Drop explosion effect  and all the linked reports to find the issues.

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2012/12/help-kwin-save-the-explosion-effect/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 7 January 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2012, week 52 and 2013, week 1)

With Christmas break over there is again quite some work happening for KWin. Of course given that 4.10 is close by a few bugs got fixed, but with master open for 4.11 we also have the first feature commits. Most of it is in the area of porting KWin to XCB. Those changes are not listed, but they are quite nice as each of them brings a small improvement due to the asynchronous nature of XCB. For the actual features I try to create bug reports again, so that they can be listed in the summary.

Crash Fixes

    308040: KWin crashes after restarting it
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    310142: KWin crash due to wobbly windows effect when closing window
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

Bug Fixes

    312346: PySolFC (And possibly other Tkinter and Tk programs), after moving window, put the menu at the original menu position.
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    293385: glsl should be disabled for the 945G because it’s slow and broken
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    308919: Window Switcher fails to repaint background if Fade Effect enabled

    311553: No minimum size on the general or effects tab of kwincompositing kcm
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

New Features

308992: Use Resize Area in Aurorae
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/01/this-week-in-kwin-2012-week-52-and-2013-week-1/

from phoronix blog

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For further  clarification go to

KDE 4.10 Will Support Menu Buttons In The Title Bar

==========================================
By Martin Gräßlin. on 14 January 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 2)

A rather busy week is behind us. Not only have there been many bugs fixed, but also some feature/refactoring branches were merged which are not listed in the summary. For example a refactoring of virtual desktops landed in master. The management of virtual desktops has been split out of the Workspace class into an own module. As new features we have more support for the application menu button in window decorations. The Laptop decoration got such a button and generic support has been added to the Aurorae theme engine. Now almost all decorations shipped with KWin can provide this button.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    305499: kde toolbar crash

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    275235: Logout effect interferes with Plasma extenders effect

    299398: shadow on volume OSD is wrong the first time

    312835: The keyboard shorcut Ctrl+Alt+Right for “Switch to next desktop” doesn’t work anymore since commit a2a335064e206f0689e315d58c30bedce90decff
    Git Commit

    311319: Color correction breaks EffectFrames
    Git Commit

    306169: Thumbnail Aside effect not updating/disappearing
    This change will be available in version 4.10 RC 3
    Git Commit

    295055: AbilityUsesAlphaChannel broken when used with shadow pixmap hints

    312168: Plasma popup shadows not drawn during slide animation
    This change will be available in version 4.10 RC 3
    Git Commit

    306404: The “walk through desktop” shortcuts don’t show up in the desktop kcm
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    281186: maximizing a full-size window causes title bar corruption

    309853: KWin kcm wrongly informs that all effects failed to load
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    312784: Can’t drag and drop files or folders on edgeless windows
    This change will be available in version 4.10 RC 3
    Git Commit

    313091: Kded-appmenu – Enabling makes “Window menu” and “on all desktops” buttons vanish
    Git Commit

New Features

    312900: wish: kwin option to save vertical space: merge window buttons into menu-bar
    This change will be available in version 4.10  see here

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/01/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-2/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 21 January 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 3)

This week has seen lots of last minute polish for the 4.10 release. Most issues should be fixed in RC3, but there is still some work going on to deal with regressions outside of KWin which nobody had noticed for too long. From the features/improvement department: KWin’s support information includes information about screens to finally end the discussions about whether a user is using multi-head, xrandr or who knows what. Our window decoration library gained support for two new window border sizes: no borders on the side and no borders at all. This is highly inspired by the already existing feature in Oxygen and got now also available in Aurorae for QML based themes.

Last but not least I wanted to remind that the summary below is generated from the bug reports set to resolved fixed in Bugzilla over the last week. This does not mean that the bug got fixed, but that the report had been set to fixed. Sometimes this is done through a commit, sometimes it’s just some house cleaning. The last weeks have seen lots of cleaning. Also the title of a bug report is mostly set by the user and especially in the case of a crash report has very often not much to do with what has really been the case. So if you want to get excited about a bug in that list, you should at least click the link and read through it and see what it is about and when it got fixed. Even if the bug report is more than a decade old it does not say anything without the context.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    302094: KWin crashes with flash
    264897: crash during alt+tab
    312712: Assert on “kwin –restart &”
    This change will be available in version 4.10 RC 3
    Git Commit

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    301909: “No titlebar and frame = Force Yes” does not work

    311896: callDBus always fails for methods with signature containing array of strings
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

    293734: kwin does not honor disableMultihead=true and causes window focus problems
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    308557: blur left on screen

    312851: Windows wider/taller than screen are cut off/partially mirrored when doing a screenshot of them using ksnapshot
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    273104: Dual screen with different dimension screens and one rotated, desktop size is getting strange values

New Features

Tasks

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/01/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-3/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 28 January 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 4)

This week quite some bug fixes have entered both 4.10 and master branch. One of the most interesting one is the improved detection for whether a window is on the local system or on a remote one. If you want to get more information about that read my dedicated blog post  But there are also some nice general improvements. The first KConfigXT patch has entered and work has started to make use of it in our Options class. The XCB porting continous with an improved Xcb::Wrapper class – for this I plan to write a dedicated post as it’s an interesting topic from the C++ perspective.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    313655: unloading of “Mouse Click Animation” result in kwin crash
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/01/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-4/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 4 February 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 5)

Major event last week has of course been the tagging of 4.10 and some last minute fixes for it. TabBox is now getting proper translucent backgrounds again, other parts of KWin still have unfortunately still problems with it. Most of the work has not yet made it into master and is still on review. There’s some new stuff for screen edges in the pipeline and some further areas got ported to XCB.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    313911: Kwin crash
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    313909: XReconfigureWMWindow fails to stack (lower) a window using an Above CWSibling combination
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit
    192807: Plastik window decoration doesn’t paint for very small windows
    310945: New maximize effect leads to visual glitch
    This change will be available in version 4.10
    Git Commit

New Features

Tasks

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-5/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 11 February 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 06)

This week we have seen the release of KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.10 and it looks like many people gave it a try over the weekend. My “bugs reported over last week” search gives me 41 reports – magnitudes more than what’s normal. My mailbox literally exploded this weekend. Not all of the bugs are new in 4.10, there are quite some which are actually older, so I don’t think we let some bugs through, but nevertheless: please test the betas. I prefer getting the bug reports before the final is released.

In the feature development department the most interesting events are the merge of the new screen edges implementation. Highlights are “multi screen aware”, glow known from Plasma’s auto-hiding panel being available on all screen edges when approaching with the mouse and no longer stealing screen edges (except corners) from active fullscreen windows. More things are planed like making it possible for Plasma to use KWin’s implementation (less code duplication) and only start the highlight if an action will be possible.

The second interesting new feature/bugfix is that KWin is able to detect whether the screen is locked and disables some privacy related effects. Currently all thumbnail effects get deactivated, screenshot and mouse mark

Summary

Crash Fixes

    314593: kwin crashes when applying “Invert” effect immediately after session unlock
    This change will be available in version 4.10.1
    Git Commit

    314409: Moving to Other Workspace Crashed KWin
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    309695: Crash in KWin::Screenedge::unreserve on deactivating Actos script
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    313996: KScreen crashes KWin when switching between resolution options
    Git Commit

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

299901: Cube animation on border approach should not be used unless the electric borders are actually in use and the config should be disabled, align or hint the electric border configuration
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

255712: “Thumbnail Aside” effect visible when screen is locked — privacy issue
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

278137: Trailing artifacts when quickily moving windows and windowgeometry affect is enabled
This change will be available in version 4.10.1
Git Commit

314590: “Show Desktop” no longer works as a toggle

313826: Outdated “Moving/resizing” option pending in kwinrules
This change will be available in version 4.10.1
Git Commit

New Features

    290887: Hot Screen Corners do not work properly in multiscreen setup with different resolutions
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    271607: Window Specific Settings for Disabling Screen Edges
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-06/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 18 February 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 07)

This week we have seen much less new reported bugs than the week before. So the 4.10 release peak is over, but openSUSE and Kubuntu releases coming soon – history tells that will also results in lots of new bugs reported. This week a very interesting bug got fixed from the category “one wonders that has ever worked”. The symptoms were already really strange for the bug and if not a fellow developer would have reported it, I would not have believed it. And it took us quite some time to figure out how to reproduce the bug although I had the chance to work with the affected system at FOSDEM.

The porting for Qt 5 did a huge step over the last week. KWin’s XRenderUtils library got ported from XLib to XCB and with that also “evil” usage of QPixmap got removed. Most of our XRender effects are now also ported to XCB. I hope to finish the QPixmap chapter this week.

Summary

Crash Fixes

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    314760: Keyboard input doesn’t work after assigning window shortcut
    This change will be available in version 4.10.1
    Git Commit

    313145: Edges and “hiden panels” stop working when System Activity is shown
    This change will be available in version 4.10.1
    Git Commit

    314756: (Desktop Effect) Mouse Click Animation does not recognize mouse buttons correctly
    This change will be available in version 4.10.1
    Git Commit

    314625: window border “stays on top” after using present windows
    This change will be available in version 4.10.1
    Git Commit

    314762: (Desktop Effect) Mouse Click Animation does not work when rising or focusing a window
    This change will be available in version 4.10.1
    Git Commit

New Features

Tasks

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-7/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 25 February 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 08)

Over the last week quite some bug fixes got merged into the 4.10 or master branch. We have some nice improvements for the desktop change OSD and even improvements for Multi-Head setups. The slideback effect operates on stacking order changes, now. This makes it working with Focus Follows Mouse.

In the Qt 5 porting preparation quite some code got prepared, but not merged yet. Our paint-redirector which is responsible to bridge between window decorations and compositor got adjusted to no longer make use of the QPixmap/XPixmap relationship for xrender on raster graphics system. As a nice side effect of this work we will get some improvements also for the OpenGL compositor.

Another area of work was the removal of QCursor usages in KWin. We used to use QCursor for setting a specific cursor when low level interacting with windows (e.g. setting the pointing hand cursor in Present Windows effect). With Qt 5 we do no longer get the underlying X cursor, so we needed to go for an own solution. We already used to have an own replacement for QCursor::pos(), which got now merged together with the other cursor handling code into an own class.

Summary

Crash Fixes

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    294490: ‘Slide back’ effect should react on stacking order changes
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    314392: Position rule conflicts with maximization rule
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

312728: “Show desktop layout indicators” option isn’t applied properly/immediately
This change will be available in version 4.10.1
Git Commit

315114: KWin fails to initialize OpenGL ES on Mali-604T
This change will be available in version 4.10.1
Git Commit

282677: Compositing not possible on each screen with multi head
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

294865: Slide Back: Sometimes the Inactive window pops to the font for apprx. one frame when it is activated.
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

New Features

    313379: Overlap factor of keepAbove windows in placeSmart should be infinite
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

    314402: String representation of KWin::Client should include caption, not name.
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-8/

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By Martin Gräßlin. on 25 March 2013 (the land of wobbly windows)

This week in KWin (2013, week 10-12)
Posted on 25. März 2013   

This week I want to start with a big thank you for our sysadmins who did a great job this weekend. And then I want to say sorry that I didn’t put up a summary the last two weeks, but I did a general blog post instead.

Last week we had to investigate one issue which quite surprised me. On Sunday a cleanup to our GLX initialization code was pushed to master. This had a small regression preventing compositing to work on NVIDIA. What surprised me is that nobody noticed till Thursday, when I setup an old system with NVIDIA to test something completely different. Is nobody running master any more or are our KDE developers no longer using the NVIDIA driver? Overall it’s not good that we have regressions in master for four days without anybody noticing. And no: CI cannot catch such issues.

Summary

Crash Fixes

    315528: KWin crashes when switching windows
    This change will be available in version 4.11
    Git Commit

Critical Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

    259640: Deleted windows not unrefed when restarting compositing
    This change will be available in version 4.10.2
    Git Commit

    317068: keepInArea does not work if window dimensions match the area dimensions

This change will be available in version 4.10.2
Git Commit
305781: Option “Suspend desktop effects for fullscreen windows” makes the image freeze when going fullscreen in applications

This change will be available in version 4.10.2
Git Commit

316040: Dual screen issue caused by d6b3f6983efebc42abd6028ece9c3ec7facea2d0
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

283309: Attaching windows to activities is too clumsy
This change will be available in version 4.10.2
Git Commit

316033: Switching from one aurorae theme to another results in no decoration
This change will be available in version 4.10.2
Git Commit

314532: Plastik (QML) decoration: poor performance with desktop effects
This change will be available in version 4.10.2
Git Commit

296076: Fix fullscreen state handling: NETWM says it’s bound to focus and not stacking order, also see bug #224600
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

313061: “Login” effect does not fade in on secondary monitor(s) with a multi screen setup
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

307965: Upper part of windows tears when moving it left/right ONLY in upper part of display
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

299245: Get rid of “Display borders on maximized windows” setting
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

237260: shortcuts for switching windows don’t work with multihead

317025: Java Swing Apps do not receive Deiconify event if window is shaded
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

91703: vertical maximization doesn’t work as expected
This change will be available in version 4.11
Git Commit

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/03/this-week-in-kwin-2013-week-10-12/