Rofi completely invisible with i3/compton, works in GNOME

gibsjose commented 5 years ago

Version

Output of rofi -v

Version: 1.5.0

Configuration

https://gist.github.com/gibsjose/ce57b4fefed6aa460eebc1c3b4620a66

~/.config/rofi/config contains:

! Rofi Configuration
rofi.combi-modi:    window,drun,ssh
! rofi.theme:         gruvbox-dark-hard
! rofi.font:          Hack 10
rofi.modi:          combi
rofi.run-command: fish -c '{cmd}'
rofi.run-list-command: 'fish -c functions'

I have also tried without the config file, using all defaults, and did not notice any change in behaviour.

Other things to note:

Running relatively fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 with i3-gaps, compton, fish shell, konsole terminal emulator
Running from inside VirtualBox, hosted on macOS

Launch Command

Does not work when launched from i3-gaps via: bindsym $mod+d exec --no-startup-id "rofi -show combi", and also does not work when launched directly from terminal (konsole) via rofi -show run.

Steps to reproduce

Open terminal
Type rofi -show run
No rofi window shows up whatsoever. Nothing is displayed to the screen
Same behaviour when invoking from i3 keybindings

What behaviour you see

I see no window appear whatsoever. Focus is removed from my current window, so there's something trying to be displayed, but nothing is displayed to the screen
If I simply log out and log back in using GNOME instead of i3, running rofi -show run works and I see the rofi window displayed
I have another VM running Ubuntu 16.04 with i3/bash, and it seems to work fine on that machine even when using i3
I have tried with the baseline i3 rather than i3-gaps, and the behaviour was the same. Nothing displayed.
I have tried launching compton from within my i3 config with exec compton --config ~/.config/compton-conf --focus-exclude '_NET_WM_NAME@:s = "rofi"', and that also did not seem to work.

What behaviour you expect to see

The normal rofi window displayed

gibsjose commented 5 years ago

Also, please note that when I run: rofi -show run, even though there is nothing displayed to the screen, I can still use rofi. For example, if I launch rofi -show run, and then type konsole followed by <enter>, it will indeed launch a new konsole window. So rofi is working... it's just not displayed to the screen.

gibsjose commented 5 years ago

Investigating a bit further, it looks like a compatibility issue with compton... Enabling compton on the 16.04 box that was working allowed me to replicate the same behaviour (no output).

My compton config file is linked below. Could you take a look at it and see if anything jumps out at you?

https://gist.github.com/gibsjose/d4adcd06ceaa21f6347fa0e95c288f3a

gibsjose commented 5 years ago

Comparing my compton-conf to the sample one in the compton repo, it looks like the only real difference is that I have backend = "glx";, instead of xrender. Is there a known incompatibility with compton and the GLX backend?

gibsjose commented 5 years ago

Okay, so switching to backend = "xr_glx_hybrid"; seems to allow rofi to display properly.

Not sure if this is going to break something else, but it at least solves this issue. I'd still like to understand why it's breaking with regular GLX.

DaveDavenport commented 5 years ago

good you figured it out, we had more issues in the past with compton.

github-actions[bot] commented 3 years ago

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.

davatorium / rofi