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QOL: Paint terminal win32 host background so it looks like the launch profile? #5572
Closed as not planned
Description
Environment
Windows build number: 10.0.18363.778
Windows Terminal version (if applicable): 0.11.1121.0
Steps to reproduce
Start Terminal and observe the short gray-to-default-profile-background-color flicker before the shell is loaded. Close Terminal and observe the same in reverse.
Expected behavior
There should be no flickering. When starting, the background of the "empty" shell area should be the same color as the default profile. When closing, the shell area should use the background color of the currently active profile/shell.
Actual behavior
The "empty" shell area is always gray, which means it transitions very quickly from gray to (typically) black when the default profile shell is displayed. Similarly when closing Terminal.
Reacted by Longhanks, dreadnaut, Scott Gammill and Poopooracoocoo
Activity
WSLUser commentedon Apr 27, 2020
letmaik commentedon Apr 27, 2020
zadjii-msft commentedon Apr 27, 2020
zadjii-msft commentedon Apr 27, 2020
Maik Riechert (@letmaik) do you mean a gray window like this?
letmaik commentedon Apr 27, 2020
This is what the moment looks like when it starts/exits:
WSLUser commentedon Apr 27, 2020
dreadnaut commentedon May 4, 2020
This happens for me as well, in the most recent release but also in previous ones. The terminal window appears initially with a white background:
then the correct theme background is applied. Both with standard decorations, or with tabs in the titlebar. The same when closing the window.
Switching the system's "default app mode" to dark does not change the flash colour: it's still white. I don't use acrylic in Terminal, and transparencies are disabled at system level.
DHowett commentedon May 18, 2020
Thanks for writing this all up!
I think it would be a nice quality of life improvement if we were to paint the window in a color closer to the one it'll eventually be filled with.
dreadnaut your issue seems different, somehow... that titlebar doesn't look familiar to me (the standard Windows one is narrower, and the custom one we draw has different caption buttons ...)
[-]Flickering when starting/closing Terminal[/-][+]QOL: Paint terminal win32 host background so it looks like the launch profile?[/+]5 remaining items
DHowett commentedon May 18, 2020
(name changed to encompass what I think would be best)
dreadnaut commentedon May 19, 2020
I use Terminal with acrylic disabled, and
which means I only see the standard Windows titlebar until I open a second tab. If I switch to tabs-in-titlebar, the flash has the same colour. I'd say it's the same issue 🙂
zadjii-msft commentedon Dec 9, 2021
I'm gonna also x-ref #11561 here. With the transparency changes in 1.12, the backgound starts as totally transparent, instead of gray/white.
There's also now the possibility that the Terminal is launching:
So this isn't necessarily straighforward "use the default profile's BG to paint the window".
mentalisttraceur commentedon Apr 7, 2022
In case this changes priority at all: getting flashbanged in the eyes like this is the number one thing I know of that makes dark themes unhelpful for some people - if your eyes are sensitive in the right way, light theme is bad and unpleasant but still better than to let your eyes get used to dark only to get sliced across the eyes with a momentary flash.
mentalisttraceur commentedon Apr 7, 2022
For anyone looking for a slightly better experience, I noticed that if I install WSL Debian, set my default terminal application to Windows Terminal instead of Windows Console Host, and then run Debian, I only get the flash on close rather than on open.
(I presume you'd get the same improvement with any command-line program which indirectly launches Windows Terminal instead of directly, but I haven't checked.)
mentalisttraceur commentedon Apr 7, 2022
Actually I take that last statement back.
Upon further testing it seems that it's only sometimes fast enough to not do the white-ish flash on launch in those cases, but other times I still get the flash.
Also an interesting effect is that the initial color on start and final color on close are different. The open color seems dimmer, like a gray, while the close color seems closer to a white.
zadjii-msft commentedon Mar 6, 2024
You know what, like 8 months ago we started having the HWND be entirely hidden until the window is ready to render. That basically makes this issue moot 😄
mentalisttraceur commentedon Mar 6, 2024
Now that you mention it, I don't remember being bothered by this problem lately.
(I moved to Emacs through gWSL as my daily driver terminal emulator about a year ago, so in those 8 months I've only opened the terminal a handful of times.)
Checking now, I can confirm that this issue seems to no longer happen, on both open and close. Big thanks.