Changing/disabling animation while alt-tabbing

[hilprl]

I am using the alt-tab script (ref: #48 (comment)) to switch to the previous window and it works perfectly. However, after triggering the script, and if the previous window is at the other end of the arranged windows, the animation used is like a very fast scroll, which sometimes hurt the eyes, especially when there are mix of windows with light (e.g Libre office documents) and black backgrounds. I was wondering if it is possible to bring the previous window to focus without this animation like in the traditional stacking WMs.

e.g. of default scroll alt_tab animation
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e9a67b77-f4e0-4320-9492-64e38bf20f99

I played around with the animations setting in my configuration, but couldn't find way to do this. I'm not very familiar with this area.

jump yes [ 0.215 0.61 0.355 1 ]

I have the default animation settings in the Scroll configuration

# Animations
animations {
    enabled yes
    default yes 300 var 3 [ 0.215 0.61 0.355 1 ]
    window_open yes 300 var 3 [ 0 0 1 1 ]
    window_move yes 300 var 3 [ 0.215 0.61 0.355 1 ] off 0.05 6 [0 0.6 0.4 0 1 0 0.4 -0.6 1 -0.6]
    window_size yes 300 var 3 [ -0.35 0 0 0.5 ]
    workspace_switch yes 500 var simple [ 0.215 0.61 0.355 1 ]
    window_fullscreen yes 500 var simple [ 0.3 0.5 0.4 1 ]
    fade_in yes 300 var simple [ 0.32 0 0.67 0 ]
    fade_out yes 300 var simple [ 0.33 1 0.68 1 ]
    # You can also define curves for the following events
    # window_move_float
    # overview
    # jump
    # layer_shell
}

Scroll version

scroll version 1.13-dev [1.12.16]
Debian GNU/Linux forky/sid

Thanks in advance

[dawsers]

In e52e435 I added the --no-animations flag for bindsym, so now you can configure any binding to disable animations while it is running. In your case:

lua $lua_scripts/alt_tab.lua init
bindsym --no-animations --no-repeat Alt+tab lua $lua_scripts/alt_tab.lua prev

There is also a new command focus_ring that you may find interesting. It handles a list of windows you can quickly set the focus on. You can modify the list to only include the open applications that you are using the most.

focus_ring_length 5
bindsym $mod+Shift+bracketleft focus_ring prev
bindsym $mod+Shift+bracketright focus_ring next
bindsym $mod+Shift+Return focus_ring set
bindsym $mod+Shift+Delete focus_ring remove
bindsym $mod+Shift+Home focus_ring first
bindsym $mod+Shift+End focus_ring last

[hilprl]

In e52e435 I added the --no-animations flag for bindsym, so now you can configure any binding to disable animations while it is running. In your case:

lua $lua_scripts/alt_tab.lua init
bindsym --no-animations --no-repeat Alt+tab lua $lua_scripts/alt_tab.lua prev

There is also a new command focus_ring that you may find interesting. It handles a list of windows you can quickly set the focus on. You can modify the list to only include the open applications that you are using the most.

focus_ring_length 5
bindsym $mod+Shift+bracketleft focus_ring prev
bindsym $mod+Shift+bracketright focus_ring next
bindsym $mod+Shift+Return focus_ring set
bindsym $mod+Shift+Delete focus_ring remove
bindsym $mod+Shift+Home focus_ring first
bindsym $mod+Shift+End focus_ring last

Can't thank you enough for adding this setting, so quickly. I will build from the master and will update you here. Will check focus-ring as well, I use Trail marks a lot which is a great/unique feature in scroll.

[hilprl]

Tried --no-animations with alt_tab.lua and it works perfectly. Thanks a lot. Also focus_ring looks very useful.Still familiarising myself with it.

[dawsers]

I am glad it works!

[hilprl]

Hi @dawsers , I have been testing --no-animations and it looks like this setting does not work when in jump mode or or while switching to a mark. Please let me know if you need a separate ticket for this. I have the following in my config.Thanks

mode "jump" {
    bindsym  s jump tiling; mode default
    bindsym  Shift+slash jump tiling all; mode default
    bindsym  c jump container; mode default
    bindsym  w jump workspaces; mode default
    bindsym  f jump floating; mode default
    bindsym  Shift+f jump floating all; mode default
    bindsym  a jump all; mode default
    bindsym  Shift+a jump all all; mode default
    bindsym  p scratchpad jump; mode default
    bindsym  t jump trailmark; mode default
    bindsym  Shift+t jump trailmark all; mode default
    bindsym  v jump; mode default
    bindsym  --no-animations  r jump criteria [app_id="firefox"]; mode default
    bindsym  --no-animations  k jump criteria [app_id="kitty"]; mode default
    bindsym  --no-animations  q jump criteria [app_id="pcmanfm-qt"]; mode default
    bindsym  --no-animations  o jump criteria [app_id="libreoffice"]; mode default
    # Return to default mode
    bindsym Escape mode "default"
    bindsym  --no-animations  b exec scrollmsg "[con_mark=b]" focus; mode default
    bindsym  --no-animations  e exec scrollmsg "[con_mark=e]" focus; mode default
    bindsym  --no-animations  m exec scrollmsg "[con_mark=t]" focus; mode default
}

    # Marks
    bindsym --no-animations $mod+m exec /home/hilprl/.config/scroll/scripts/scroll-mark-toggle.sh
    bindsym --no-animations $mod+Shift+m exec /home/hilprl/.config/scroll/scripts/scroll-mark-remove.sh
    bindsym --no-animations $mod+apostrophe exec /home/hilprl/.config/scroll/scripts/scroll-mark-switch.sh

[dawsers]

Hi @dawsers , I have been testing --no-animations and it looks like this setting does not work when in jump mode or or while switching to a mark. Please let me know if you need a separate ticket for this. I have the following in my config.Thanks

jump

The "jump" command correctly disables its animation. If you look at jump organizing the windows, there is no animation there. If you are talking about after you select a window, there the focus command is animated, but that is not part of the jump key binding, jump is already done by then, leaving only a callback to change focus when you select a window (other things can happen at that point that are not jump related). If I disabled that, there would be no reference or way to know whether the user wants it disabled or not, because the key binding with the --no-animations argument has already finished. Imagine a more specific case, say you disabled animations for scale_workspace overview like this:

    bindsym --no-repeat --no-animations $mod+tab scale_workspace overview

This would also disable animations only for the animations where the windows scale and reorganize to fit the monitor. But it wouldn't make sense to also disable all the other animations that will happen while the user works in overview mode, those are separate transactions. You can move windows, create new ones etc., and all will use different bind commands or internal transactions.

The good news is you can disable animations while in jump mode by disabling the jump animation, like this:

animations {
...
  jump no
...
}

Marks

About marks, you are calling a script that does several things, and the same applies. The script at the end calls scrollmsg "[con_mark=\b$mark\b]" focus, the --no-animation argument only affects the command that calls the script, but if the script later on does other things, it cannot know what is happening.

For those things to work the way you expect, each command would need to have a setting to enable or disable animations, the same way I added it to bind, but that is a different thing that what this feature is about altogether.

BUT, the good news is you can already do what you want by using another command, animations_enable false. Use it like this in your script:

#!/bin/bash

marks=($(scrollmsg -t get_marks | jq -r '.[]'))

generate_marks() {
    for mark in "${marks[@]}"; do
        echo "$mark"
    done
}

mark=$( (generate_marks) | rofi -p "Switch to mark" -dmenu)
[[ -z $mark ]] && exit

scrollmsg animations_enable false
scrollmsg "[con_mark=\b$mark\b]" focus
scrollmsg animations_enable true

[hilprl]

Thanks a mil for the detailed explanation. I will try this.