[xmonad] Wallpaper Appearing Briefly on Client Creation/Destruction in Tiled Layouts

[Norbert Zeh]

wagnerdm at seas.upenn.edu [2011.10.06 1017 -0400]:
> Quoting Troels Henriksen <athas at sigkill.dk>:
> 
> >wagnerdm at seas.upenn.edu writes:
> >
> >>That strategy doesn't work when the layout of all the windows changes,
> >>since a window cannot be mapped at two places (and, potentially,
> >>sizes!) at once.
> >
> >You could dump the contents of the workspace region to a pixmap, render
> >that pixmap to a new (unmanaged) window covering the entire workspace,
> >perform window movement/mapping behind it and unmap the covering window
> >at the end.  This would work, but it's ugly and complex.  I doubt a
> >simple and robust solution to this aesthetic issue can be conceived.
> 
> Cute. The generalization of this idea leads directly to a simple,
> robust solution: never unmap clients, and using OpenGL compositing
> to hide them instead. ;-)

Compositing is pretty much what I was thinking about when I was mentioning
other DEs.  I was thinking about a scenario where I'm switching to a different
desktop using fancy effects (e.g., a slide motion).  In that case, the switch
is not a simple matter of mapping one set of windows and then unmapping the
previous set of windows.

I agree with Troels, though, that a simple and robust solution may be
impossible, and I certainly value these two attributes of xmonad more highly
than a bit of flicker upon layout changes.

Cheers,
Norbert