On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 11:49:12PM +0100 I heard the voice of Aaron Sloman, and lo! it spake thus: > > I have now restarted, using this. It all seems to work, but with a > minor problem that I noticed in an earlier version running on this > machine: > > After restarting the new ctwm on SL or invoking a menu option to > re-read .ctwmrc, menus come up initially without the menu items > showing, only the menu name at the top and the menu frame.
TLDR: Try setting NoBackingStore. The journey: OK, I got an X server running on a CentOS 6 VM, and I get what looks like similar (though not identical) symptoms. What _I_ wind up with is the background of each line not being set (just left black) until the mouse goes over it. This is apparently intentional behavior: when a menu entry is painted via "exposure" (which happens when e.g. you pop up a menu), the background is [generally] not painted, because it would be a waste, since it's already set from before. It's only painted when you roll over/off it, since then it's changing. The reason this isn't causing anybody ELSE trouble, is that the background for the entries is all the same[0], and that's the background color for the entire menu window, so there's nothing to repaint until we want to highlight an item. So actually, it's not the background of the _line_, it's the background of the _whole window_. If I set colors specifically on one line, they do get painted, and look fine. So what's apparently going on is that it's failing to set the background color on the window. I can even manually set it to anything, and it still winds up black. Oddly, setting the background color on the shadow window (which is how drop shadows are made) works just perfectly. The difference is apparently that the main menu window requests backing store. And something about that (whether it's the request, or faulty use of it in the X server) causes it to lose the background. If I just don't let it ask for backing store, it all works just fine. So, set NoBackingStore in the config file, and it all works fine for me. In point of fact, I've wondered in passing whether we should just make that the default. X servers paint awful fast now, and with the number of people using compositors, there's no point to it anyway. I'm more than half tempted to completely remove all use of it wholesale; I think the whole idea is pretty much a remnant of 80's hardware limitations. Any thoughts? [0] unless you specify explicit colors for individual menu items. That's also where the [generally] in the previous paragraph comes in... -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | [email protected] Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
