Handle clients which change window metadata during early startup

Authored by hein on Sep 10 2018, 3:45 PM.

Description

Handle clients which change window metadata during early startup

Summary:
Some apps initially show their window with bogus/useless window
metadata and then update to useful metadata during early startup.
For example, LibreOffice sets WM_CLASS to soffice/Soffice and
then updates to libreoffice-writer/libreoffice. This leads to
a poor user experience on particular the Icons-only Task Manager,
but also the regular Task Manager depending on settings.

Depending on its configuration (and Icons-only Task Manager is
a particular set of configuration options, as far as the model
is concerned), TasksModel will try to sort a new window task
adjacent to its launcher task. The appearance of a new window
task also causes matching (in terms of identification) launcher
or startup tasks to be filtered out. To the user, this forms a
lifecycle of the launcher being replaced by the window in-place
(and a startup state inbetween, optionally but by default).

Prior to this patch, this sorting decision was only done once,
when a new window enters the source model stack. This meant the
LibreOffice window would initially be sorted into the "wrong"
spot (the bogus metadata doesn't allow us to relate it to its
launcher) and then, following the metadata change, stick to the
wrong position.

Simply changing the code to sort things again on any metadata
change would not have been good enough: Metadata changes can
occur at any time, and things should not just move around on
the user - this sort mode is called "Manual" for a reason. Also,
the visual result would still be poor: The window would initially
appear at the wrong position, then move to the right one a bit
later.

This patch takes the following approach:

  • It adds a new config key to taskmanagerrulesrc for listing ids of matching tasks to completely hide, and of course the code needed to implement this.
  • It adds LibreOffice' bogus initial metadata to this key, so the tasks is initially hidden.
  • The sort code skips over hidden window tasks in the sort insert queue instead of moving them. The queue is marked as stale then, and cleared on unrelated windowing system changes.
  • It resorts when tasks are unhidden (i.e. once the metadata update has occured and the task no longer matches the above config key).

The visual result is that the startup notification on the
launcher spins a little bit longer than before, even though the
window has already appeared (although LO lags in filling in its
contents anyway), and then morphs into the window task
representation once the client has completed the window metadata
change. This happens in such a short order as to be more or less
imperceptible.

If startup notifications are turned off it's broadly the same,
minus the spinning.

BUG:396871

Reviewers: davidedmundson, broulik, ngraham

Subscribers: plasma-devel

Tags: Plasma

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D15410

Details