On X11 backend window can become obscured

[head-gardener]

Specifically on XMonad, spawning new windows in the same workspace places a window on top of the stack and causes window manager to restack the layout, obscuring activate-linux window. Applications like dunst fix this by re-raising themselves on CreateNotify: https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst/blob/77bfbc4f7ff0a0ace6a7c9f0d9823ca3ca0fe3fd/src/x11/x.c#L348. I wonder if something similar could be implemented here.

[MrGlockenspiel]

I briefly looked into this and it seems pretty simple.

Can you change line src/x11/x11.c:137 to read:

XSelectInput(d, overlay[i], ExposureMask | StructureNotifyMask);

and add this after src/x11/x11.c:214:

else if (event.type == CreateNotify) {
    __debug__("! Got X CreateNotify event, raising overlay window\n");
    XRaiseWindow(d, event.xcreatewindow.window);
}

That should do exactly what dunst is doing.
I don't use Xmonad so I can't test it, but let me know if it works and I'll push it.

[head-gardener]

Thanks for the reply. As per Xlib docs you actually need SubstructureNotifyMask to listen for CreateNotify. However neither mask fixes the issue on my system and logs don't show any event received at all when I spawn new windows,

EDIT: I was able to capture the event by subscribing to the root window with

XSelectInput(d, root, SubstructureNotifyMask);

After that activate-linux did attempt raising itself, but it still remained obscured somehow (and occasionally crashed). Hope to look into it more tomorrow.

[MagicRB]

@head-gardener did you end up looking into this? ran into the same thing on xmonad as well

[head-gardener]

@MagicRB I haven't. Either way I don't know too much about writing code for X, so any help is appreciated.