Maximise / restore transition UX niggle

[qgates]

When maximising and restoring Ghostty via window controls or <C-Enter>, the UI animates the transition to and from maximised. The visuals are jarring however - text is zoomed and then redrawn at the correct size at the end of the transition.

It's also much slower. With a terminal I want to hop to full screen and back again instantly.

My preference is no animation and instant full-screen / restore. Could this be added as an option?

Arch Linux, Cinnamon. Latest updates. Lenovo T460

[rhodes-b]

As far as I know ghostty has no control over the animation on fullscreen / maximize it simply just asks GTK to maximize the window

ghostty/src/apprt/gtk/Window.zig

Line 568 in 71e62f9

c.gtk_window_maximize(self.window);

ghostty/src/apprt/gtk/Window.zig

Line 578 in 71e62f9

c.gtk_window_fullscreen(self.window);

which ends up asking your Desktop Environment / Window Manager to fullscreen or maximize
linuxmint/cinnamon#5137 (an example of someone asking to disable animations for specific apps you can do more research)
you can see that https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/method.Window.maximize.html
in the documentation on one of these functions

Asks to maximize window, so that it becomes full-screen. Note that you shouldn’t assume the window is definitely maximized afterward, because other entities (e.g. the user or [window manager][gtk-X11-arch]) could unmaximize it again, and not all window managers support maximization. But normally the window will end up maximized. Just don’t write code that crashes if not.
It’s permitted to call this function before showing a window, in which case the window will be maximized when it appears onscreen initially.
You can track maximization via the “window-state-event” signal on GtkWidget, or by listening to notifications on the GtkWindow:is-maximized property.

For example using sway toggle_fullscreen is "instant" for me.

I do see font rendering being large for a split second before going to the proper size. I believe this is due to rendering and terminal processing running on separate threads in ghostty core, not sure how much effort can be done there to synchronize without a large sacrifice to speed

[qgates]

Thanks for your helpful reply. Looking at the sources you are correct.

I'm left with the question of whether this is good UX for this type of application though. My use of terminal involves often and rapidly switching between fullscreen and windowed, especially in multiscreen setups, and a number of colleagues have complained about this with ghostty on Linux.

I understand the desire for ghostty to "play well" with the host environment, something which some other terminals handle badly. But in this case it feels counterproductive. Perhaps a configurable "fast maximise" option, where resizing is taken care of within ghostty instead of by GTK, would offer the required performance, concurrently losing the jarring transition.

Together with (as I understand it) the coming option to hide window chrome when maximised, this would achieve the best usability for Linux users: instant response when going full screen back and forth and no loss of screen real estate when full screen, with the option to retain current behaviour for those who prefer it.

I'm new to Zig but have many years building systems in C/C++. If there's sufficient interest in this from users and willingness to incorporate it into the codebase from the author, I could look at adding this feature.

[jcollie]

Completely moving the responsibility of fullscreen/maximize from GTK to Ghostty I would say is a non-starter (if it's even possible). The whole point of using a GUI toolkit like GTK (or any other toolkit, really) is so that Ghostty doesn't need to roll it's own GUI engine. You're better off looking into the various Gnome extensions that purport to modify GTK's animation speeds. I've never used any of them, so I can't vouch for them but this is what I found with a few minutes of searching:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/277/impatience/
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/

If you don't use Gnome you could investigate what these extensions are doing and try to replicate that in your own environment.

[jcollie]

Also, the Arch wiki has some great tips on animation speeds:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Tips_and_tricks#Change_animation_speed

[qgates]

@jcollie I wasn't suggesting a 'move' of this away from GTK, but an extra capability. If ghostty is already able to set its size via configs, and hide window chrome via configs, the only thing left to do is position it to create a full screen window. Sure, it won't be functionally the same as maximise and restore (as done by GTK), but as an alternative, instant "full screen toggle".

Feel free to point out if I'm missing something here, but can't we cherry pick some of the good things from other terminals?

[jcollie]

I pointed out above GTK does allow a method to control the speed of the animations for those that are interested so I don't think that any major surgery is needed on Ghostty. And having dealt with GTK before it's a major struggle to get it to do things that it doesn't want to do. That would become a major maintenance burden, likely breaking now and then as GTK makes changes behind the scenes.

Also note that libghostty will allow anyone so inclined to create their own frontend ("app runtime" in Ghostty parlance) that suits their use case better than the standard GTK frontend.