Any chance of adding aliased rounded corners?

[Alanon202]

After giving up on picom for its many memory leaks I was delighted to find fastcompmgr! It’s been performing wonderfully, so thank you very much for that. My Openbox setup feels that much lighter now that the compositor isn’t gobbling up 10x the memory footprint the entire WM is.

The one thing Openbox is missing are rounded corners, which picom was able to provide. Sadly, the rounded corner patch for Openbox leaves a lot to be desired, and there aren’t many other options around, so I came here to ask if there’s any chance of adding some roundage to fastcompmgr at some point?

AFAIK Compton had some sort of rounded corner feature, though I have no idea whether it was any good. Picom’s implementation was probably the cause of many instances of memory leakage, so I’ll understand if it’s too much trouble for little to no benefit.

[tycho-kirchner]

Cheers - and sorry for the late reply. Last week was my defense and due to that I was a little buzy __ .
Regarding rounded corners - well, never say never, but honestly, I don't hink I'll add them to fastcompmgr any time soon. The next point on my agenda is to finally fix vsync and already for that it's currently hard to find a free time slot.
However, I'm an openbox user myself, even have my own hacked version running (for fast composited virtual desktop switching).
You say

the rounded corner patch for Openbox leaves a lot to be desired

, I'm assuming you refer to this patchset? Never tried that one myself but I suppose it might be easier to fix rounded corners in Openbox itself? What exactly is the issue with that one?

Thanks
Tycho

[Alanon202]

Hey, no worries, I’m honestly glad you even replied. :) I thought it was a long shot with rounding corners, but still I’d much have the stability of fastcompmgr than the memory leaks of picom. Anyway, on to your questions (delighted to find another openbox user still around btw).

I believe it is that set of patches in some form, because they’re the only ones floating around. Initialy openbox with these patches wouldn’t build at all due to errors with the rounding function. When I fixed the errors by adding the proper header files at the proper place I was able to build openbox but rounding wouldn’t work at all. Finally, I was able to find a prebuilt patched openbox that properly applied the corner rounding as well as the no rounding on fullscreen so I gave up trying to troubleshoot the patchset as clearly something had changed somewhere.

There are two glaring issues - first and minor is that for some reason the iconify animation causes a cascading effect of graphical glitches. Now, given that I’m mucking about with some random precompiled package, I can’t be sure it isn’t some failing of that specific version, or a consequence of it interacting with fastcompmgr in some unpredictable ways. It doesn’t occur always, but when whatever is broken decides to break, here’s what it looks like (I just minimized pcmanfm-qt while on the desktop):

Basically the clear steps are steps in the animation itself that somehow get recorded there. Either way it goes away if I disable animate iconify. A pity but nothing tragic, though I would be glad to get rid of it.

The second and much more annoying issue is that rounding corners isn’t consistent. As best I can tell, it’s that GTK4 apps are frozen once rendered rounded. They remain fixed at the color of the background at the time they were rendered. As soon as you move the window from its initial position, you get this wonderful effect:

This goes for apps like Font Manager, pamac-manager, cameractrls, which I believe are all GTK4, Qt apps and older GTK3 apps seem to work just fine. Also, most annoying of all is that urxvt, Alacritty and Kitty suffer the same issues as these GTK4 apps, which is honestly much worse, since I spend much more time in the terminal than looking at these few GTK4 apps.

Anyway, I’ve rambled far too much. If you have any thoughts or some ideas for potential solutions, please let me know.

Cheers!

[Alanon202]

Hey @tycho-kirchner just wanted to chime in and say that it looks like some recent update eliminated the corner issues from the post above? I’m not sure how or what, but I logged in after not using my laptop for a month or so, updated everything and all corners are now rounded in all apps on openbox with no artefacts. :D It could very well be one of fastcomp’s recent updates?

[tycho-kirchner]

Thanks for the update and glad to hear, it's working now. Yep, there were updates to fastcompmgr - my educated guess is, that commit 3c61549 fixed the issue. Can you confirm?

[Alanon202]

Thanks for the update and glad to hear, it's working now. Yep, there were updates to fastcompmgr - my educated guess is, that commit 3c61549 fixed the issue. Can you confirm?

That’s the one! I usually build from git, so I got the latest updates including that commit, but I quickly downloaded and tried the last release (0.5) and the corner issue showed up right away.