[Clfswm-devel] Pain caused by daily use.

[Philippe Brochard]

Michaël Cadilhac writes:

> Hi there Philippe and folks;
>
Hi Michaël,

> I'm reporting on my daily use of CLFSWM, on which I have two major
> griefs and one minor. Any help on these are very welcome.
>
First many thanks for your feedback! It's really useful for all.

> 1. This is the slowest WM I've ever used.  After some hours of use,
> switching between two windows can take up to 8 seconds on my arguably
> modest laptop, and 5 seconds on a quad core "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3470
> CPU @ 3.20GHz".  This is crazy.  When I get lost in my window tree, —
> and that still happens quite a lot since lots of times I just avoid
> creating a tree to not wait minutes to go from windows to windows —
> I'm in pain and sadness.  As when you burn bread in a toaster.  Oh the
> sour pain.  What can I do?  (I tried nicing it.)
>
Wow, this is really weird. You've a laptop at least twice more powerful
than mine (acer aspire one, 1,66GHz, 1Gb ram) and I don't experience the
same problems. So I think there is something wrong in your setup.

First, can you tell us what is your OS, your lisp implementation, your
CLX implementation and your clfswm version. Do you use xcompmgr for
transparency? Do you use toolbars?

Personally, I use clisp+portable clx[1] under Debian stable and always the
last git version with no transparency and no toolbars.

Second, once you see some lags, please can you investigate and report
the CPU and memory usage of CLFSWM ? (top will be enough in a first
time).

> 2.  I rely on the popup console for quite a few background things
> (music, ssh proxy, ...).  This has two main bugs.  First, when it
> takes more than 4 seconds to pop up, the focus is not put on the
> console, but rather stays on the background window.  Quickly removing
> and repopping the window usually assures that it displays quickly
> enough to get focused.  It thus takes me a good 10 seconds and some
> frustration to just pause the music.  Second, when there is more than
> one window on the screen, I have to be focused on a specific one for
> the console to even have a chance to get the focus.
>
There is effectively a bug here about the focus. I'll have a look. 
But there is something really weird to have to wait 4 seconds to have
the xterm pop up. 
You'll have to investigate here to. On my laptop (even on a Debian live
booted from an iso image from a usb key), I get the xterm pop up nearly
instantaneously.
How many times does it takes to start an xterm for you with another
window manager (I like icewm for comparison).

> 3.  When CLFSWM is started, NumLock is off.  If I switch NumLock on,
> then the Mod key does not respond the CLFSWM way (even the mouse does
> not do all clfswm related commands).  Same goes with CapsLock.
>
Here it's not a bug but a feature. NumLock and CapsLock are seen as
modifiers. I use this sometimes with xbindkeys to have two different
keys layout.
If you want to always use NumLock with CLFSWM, use a program like
numlockx, start it in your .xsession, .Xclients, .xwhatever and add
(with-numlock) in your .clfswmrc (same thing with-capslock).

If you want to use Numlock as a modifier for only some keys, you can add
the :mod-2 in the modifier list.


> Thanks for your help!
>
Please investigate and report any feedback. We have to fix your
problems since I (at least) don't experience them.

For other folks still there, do you have also some lags after some hours
of usage as Michaël?

> M.
>
Philippe


[1] git://github.com/sharplispers/clx.git