Blink issue (window flash white during startup)

[muminoff]

Hi @jwilm, nice project 👍

Why it blinks white color during start-up? When I run alacritty window opens up and terminal (black) part gets white and returns back to black color.

[jwilm]

nice project

Thanks :smile:

Why it blinks white color during start-up? When I run alacritty window opens up and terminal (black) part gets white and returns back to black color.

Would you mind providing a video and some info about your system? Sounds very strange.

[muminoff]

Sounds very strange

Yeah, seems like I couldn't describe the issue well.

Would you mind providing a video

Here is the link to video.

some info about your system

OS: macOS Sierra 10.12.2
Rust: rustc 1.16.0-nightly (6f1ae663e 2017-01-06)

[coder543]

This behavior doesn't occur on Ubuntu Linux, and I believe @jwilm is using macOS. I wonder what the cause could be? A quirk of some particular video driver with initializing an OpenGL context?

[dzklaim]

I'm using Fedora 26 (GNOME). I just compiled alacritty and I'm facing a similar(?) problem. When I start the terminal it blinks (the window gets black for a second). after that the window is resized (according to the geometry in the configuration file) and it is correctly displayed.

[guskovd]

Archlinux, latest build from git. reproduces stably very difficult to use if the background is light

[kovetskiy]

hey guys, same issue on archlinux. latest build from git. the problem reproduces stably, impossible to use, in vim it blinks every time when I use j/k.

[kovetskiy]

[jwilm]

@kovetskiy sounds like you have visual bell enabled. Setting visual_bell.duration to 0 should disable it.

[kovetskiy]

@jwilm thanks, fixed now. By the way, I used default config.

@guskovd take a look, may be it will help you too.

[guskovd]

This thread is not about a problem with the visual bell. I understand that the author described the problem associated with drawing a new window. In my case, when switching to the alacrity window, the background remains black for a while. This generates "flashes"

[guskovd]

Sorry for my English, but if I do not understand clearly, please read the thread: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1370791 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771708 The bug with alacrity is very similar to the problem described. Perhaps to solve the problem, it is worth looking at the Sebastian patch. The bottom line is that the background color should remain equal to the default background value of gtk3 until the window is finally rendered

[charles-l]

Same thing on Void Linux (cwm, no compositor) as well. Window renders black for an instant and resize on startup. I'm using an NVidia card with the proprietary drivers.

[bohrshaw]

In "i3" window manager, I also get a black flash when doing this:

• alacritty's background color is set as light.
• Run nvim file_with_content in alacritty.
• From another workspace, run i3-msg '[class=Alacritty] focus' to switch to the alacritty window.

[YaLTeR]

Getting a flash of random past framebuffer contents on startup consistently. Video. Here it's flashing black, but it's really random: sometimes it was flashing contents of Firefox open in another tag.

Arch Linux, alacritty 0.2.1 from the repositories, Awesome WM, no compositor, nvidia proprietary drivers.

[chrisduerr]

@YaLTeR Does a compositor resolve this problem?

[YaLTeR]

Not sure, I'll have to set one up to test.

[YaLTeR]

Yep, same issue when running compton.

[YaLTeR]

I'm also seeing similar flashing when alacritty's window is shown (so either unminimizing alacritty's window, or switching to a tag with alacritty).

[Tumetsu]

Any news on this? I'm having problem similar to YaLTeR. When I open the Alacritty window, it seems to flash a contents of some random previous frame buffer before the contents are initialized. This happens on with Alacritty 0.5.0 on Manjaro + i3 with Compton on or off. I'm using Nvidia proprietary drivers version 450.66.

The flashing happens everytime I open the terminal though the contents of the flash seem relatively random.

[nixpulvis]

I would be somewhat surprised to hear that the original macOS issue here was still unresolved. We've since added logic to start up Alacritty as invisible (on macOS and Linux), and show the window only after the first swap buffers, which I imagine fixes this issue.

However, I have seen the behavior described above with previous buffers being displayed momentarily inside the newly created alacirtty instance. But I feel like I see this with other applications as well. Perhaps this is an issue with the window manager, or graphics drivers?

[Tumetsu]

That is actually a good point since latest Nvidia drivers (at least 450 series) cause graphical glitches on Chromium and Firefox after suspend. I haven't seen flashes of previous buffers in other applications with exception of Kitty flashing some artifacts during its startup. Other than I haven't seen similar problems with Xfce terminal for example or other software I use daily.

Maybe I'll try to downgrade to Nvidia 430 series drivers to see if it solves the browser problem and this.

EDIT: Downgrading to as old as 430 didn't seem to help and Alacritty seems to have similar blinking as with newer drivers.

[charbelnicolas]

Im using the latest alacritty stable release on Arch Linux with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers and it always flashes on startup. It was one of the reasons I switched to kitty. Seems it is a long standing bug which will probably never be fixed...

[charbelnicolas]

Can you tell the difference between kitty and alacritty? Opening and closing dozens of terminals a day is quite annoying when it flashes.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/14960414/127756066-02114509-d936-4379-be30-5e9790158749.mp4

[charbelnicolas]

To be honest, the flashes aren't the worst part of alacritty when it has terrible issues like this:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/14960414/127756249-098d7611-15e1-4c6c-a961-a326b5b273d4.mp4