Hi all,
I’m an embedded software engineer and I’ve been using fvwm since '94 and have stuck with it at work and home through various versions of Sun, Solaris, Windows (cygwin), & Linux. I’ve always used xterm but lately Brave Browser and Skype seem to be messing with my xterms, with Brave being the worst of the two. I’ve upgraded to fvwm3, version 1.0.4 but saw the same problem in fvwm2. I’m running a two monitor system, one a 4k monitor and the other a WXGA. I’ve got an NVidia graphics card (T600 processor, NVIDIA 470.103.01 drivers). I’m running Ubuntu 20.04. Xinerama is installed. When the applications are running, I sometimes (but not always) get double lines in my xterm after a press of enter or return:
What’s odd is that if I highlight the double text with the mouse or take a screen grab the double text goes away. If I hover over one of the problematic application, the text in the double-lined xterms start to jump and flicker. If I quit and restart the problem applications or even switch to a different desktop and back the problem clears for existing text, but entering new carriage returns in the xterm causes the problem to return. Once this problem starts I often have to exit fvwm to make it stop; not even a fvwm restart fixes the problem. And it only seems to impact xterm - lxterminal does not exhibit this problem. I’ve never seen this problem on my single monitor system with the same 4k monitor running fvwm2 and Debian 10.
I’ve tried mucking around with various xterm settings to no avail - the problem still occurs in a simple “xterm”, no options. Likewise the problem occurs while both at the shell and within vim. I can dump Brave but I need Skype for my job. Since nothing crashes, just the display acts funny, I don’t know if there would be any logs. Is there anything I can do to fix or investigate this?
Thanks,
Michael
Hello Michael,
This doesn’t sound like a FVWM problem to me – but probably a graphics driver issue? Do you see the same thing with XTerm using a different window manager?
Kindly,
Thomas
I’m running Ubuntu (not my first choice) and the only other desktop installed is the Ubuntu desktop, which is very painful to use. I believe I tried it under the Ubuntu desktop and did not see the problem, but I will try again in the next day or two to confirm.
I ran under the Ubuntu desktop for about 20 minutes and didn’t see it. But then launched into FVWM and didn’t see the problem until I joined a meeting and shared my desktop with the Skype app. I’ll test some more to try to narrow down the trigger.
During the last year or so I’d poke around and try to isolate the problem. The problem only occurred when running the Skype application (not the browser version) - this problem did not occur if I was not running the Skype application. Now the company I work for switched to Teams, and using “teams-for-linux” I see the same issue. Both Microsoft applications, I’m sure it’s a coincidence 
Anyway, after a day of trying this and that (new window managers, replacement terminals, etc…) I found the problem occurs in other window managers (e.g. fluxbox) but never with another terminal program - only xterm. And I tried many terminal programs to find something close to the capabilities of xterm, and the closest I found was rxvt. I’m not thrilled with it but at least it does not exhibit this problem.
So probably not an issue with FVWM3 (I’m running 1.06a), but with xterm, or at least with something xterm uses that no other application I’ve seen uses.
Teams can be problematic with many window managers, heck… even desktops like kde. Microsoft announced last year they would terminate support for the electron client for linux in favor of the web interface. I think they already did, not sure.
I found that Teams can behave in an acceptable way in fvwm with this:
DestroyFunc UrgencyFunc
AddToFunc UrgencyFunc
+ I ThisWindow (State 11) Break
+ I Iconify off
+ I FlipFocus
+ I Raise
+ I WarpToWindow !raise 5p 5p
+ I Nop
Style "Microsoft Teams*" !MwmDecor, Handles, Borders, FixedPPosition, FixedPSize, !FPGrabFocus, !FPFocusByProgram, RecaptureHonorsStartsOnPage, CaptureHonorsStartsOnPage, StartsOnPageIncludesTransients, State 11
I do not know is this will fix the quirks you have been experiencing, but it will prevent Teams from being extremely annoying as it usually is.
You could give Terminology a try. Is supposed to mimic closely xterm and it also adds some extras that may or may not be useful to you…
Preliminarily, adding your UrgencyFunc looks good. I added this for both Skype & Teams and switched back to xterms and haven’t seen the problem since.
Terminology looks good but I’ve been steering away from the graphical-style xterms.
Looks like I spoke too soon - the problem started happening again today. Back to rxvt…
@michael67
Please can you raise a bug report on fvwm3’s repository on Github? I won’t be tracking bug-reports here.
Kindly,
Thomas
Are you sure it should be against FVWM and not xterm? Again, I see the problem in other window managers but in no other shell or application other than xterm.
