Tilix: Delay when opening Quake mode

[p-e-w]

(Fedora 26 with GNOME on Wayland with animations disabled, Tilix ~1.7.1~ 1.6.4)

There is a noticeable lag (~ 200 ms) between pressing the hotkey and the dropdown terminal appearing. Guake does not have this problem.

Not sure how much of this is due to the compositor and indeed whether there is anything you can do about it. I am aware that Guake uses keybinder which does not work with Wayland. Perhaps the lag is nothing more than the process being launched each time. Nevertheless, I find it a bit distracting and decided to open an issue since there doesn't seem to be one already.

[gnunn1]

I cannot reproduce this on Arch Linux running Gnome on Wayland. What's the output of tilix --version? Also, if you open gnome-terminal and run tilix --quake from there do you notice the same delay, tilix uses DBusActivation by default so that could be causing it as well.

BTW thanks for your work on finalterm, it was a great project.

[klingtnet]

I can confirm this on Arch with Gnome 3.26 and X11:

$ tilix --version
Versions
    Tilix version: 1.7.1
    VTE version: 0.50
    GTK Version: 3.22.25

Tilix Special Features
    Notifications enabled=0
    Triggers enabled=0
    Badges enabled=0

The lag on my machine is notably longer than 200ms, more in the range of one to a couple of seconds.
Restarting tilix helps, though.

[klingtnet]

Here is a zipped (tilix-quake-delay.zip) demonstration video where I open and close tilix two times. Note that I immediately pressed my tilix quake mode shortcut after closing it.

[klingtnet]

Maybe some additional information, resetting my Gnome configuration to defaults and disabling all extensions does not help.

[klingtnet]

This is the output of $ dbus-monitor when closing and opening tilix in quake mode:
tilix-dbus.log

journalctl does not show anything suspicious which is why I don't paste it here.

[klingtnet]

I just installed tilix-git but the issue is still there.

[klingtnet]

Maybe a last addition, tilix starts immediately in _normal_ mode (not as drop-down).

[gnunn1]

If you run tilix --quake from gnome-terminal is there a delay? If there is not, try disabling dbus activation in the desktop file.

[klingtnet]

@gnunn1 It takes the same time to open.

... disabling dbus activation in the desktop file.

How can I do that?

[klingtnet]

Here is the strace:
tilix-strace.log

It waits at the first occurence of line poll([{fd=10, events=POLLIN}], 1, 25000) = 1 ([{fd=10, revents=POLLIN}]).

[fbernier]

I also get this on archlinux:

Versions
        Tilix version: 1.7.1
        VTE version: 0.50
        GTK Version: 3.22.25

Tilix Special Features
        Notifications enabled=0
        Triggers enabled=0
        Badges enabled=0

It seems like it redraws every time I hide/show. Vim moves around to get back into fullscreen each time.

EDIT: it might be because I'm using it with the --full-screen option too
EDIT2: My bad, I guess this isn't the same issue. My problem really is caused by --full-screen causing a resize every time.

[gnunn1]

@klingtnet You can edit the tilix desktop file, com.gexperts.Tilix.desktop, and change DBusActivatable=true to DBusActivatable=false.

[klingtnet]

@gnunn1 This fixed the issue, thank you very much!

Update: I was a bit to hasty, there is still a significant delay when opening tilix in quake mode but it only came back after the machine has run some time.

[klingtnet]

Restarting the gnome-shell session fixed it. So the problem is probably caused on the Gnome side.

[klingtnet]

I've just created an issue in Gnome's bug tracker: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790059

[gnunn1]

Thanks, closing issue as upstream.

[p-e-w]

@gnunn1 Apologies for the delay (no pun intended), some more details:

What's the output of tilix --version?

$ tilix --version
Versions
    Tilix version: 1.6.4
    VTE version: 0.48
    GTK Version: 3.22.21

Tilix Special Features
    Notifications enabled=1
    Triggers enabled=0
    Badges enabled=0

(Contradicting my original claim that I had Tilix 1.7.1, sorry for the confusion.)

Also, if you open gnome-terminal and run tilix --quake from there do you notice the same delay

Yes.

try disabling dbus activation in the desktop file.

Hard to say whether this makes a difference because it is so difficult to measure the delay precisely. The one thing that is certain is that in all cases, the delay is substantially greater than it ever was with Guake.

Unlike @klingtnet there doesn't appear to be an issue with GNOME Shell in my case as it happens every time, even after a full system restart (restarting GNOME Shell alone is not possible on Wayland). Then again, as mentioned I do not experience multi-second delays, only 100-200 ms.

BTW thanks for your work on finalterm, it was a great project.

Thank you, and thank you for creating Tilix! There has been much change in the world of terminal emulators in the past few years, fuelled by the meteoric rise of macOS (and thus iTerm2), web experiments like Hyper and Black Screen, the appearance of Tilix and its rapid adoption among GNOME users, and the upstart Alacritty.

As a Linux user, I was always jealous of iTerm2 and its huge array of features, but I now consider Tilix to be even better (VTE was always much better than iTerm2 performance-wise, but GNOME Terminal is pretty barebones). It's quite amazing what you have built here in such a short time, and how quickly you always respond to issues and resolve them! There are very few Linux Desktop projects today that I would consider to be on par with Tilix quality-wise.

In the long term, I am placing my faith in Alacritty for emulation, because its superior performance, code infrastructure, and the fact that it runs on macOS are bound to give it the momentum to steamroll all others eventually. The author however refuses to add "advanced" features such as tabs and splits, which is why I view Alacritty more as a backend and hope that it might be able to replace VTE in Tilix in the far future. I have already opened an issue to this effect here.

[simontong]

I'm getting this issue on KDE + Arch Linux. It takes about 400ms for quake mode to appear.

Versions
    Tilix version: 1.9.1
    VTE version: 0.60
    GTK Version: 3.24.17

Tilix Special Features
    Notifications enabled=0
    Triggers enabled=0
    Badges enabled=1