Workspace animation jiggly

[musjj]

Mine:

mine.mp4

Yours:

aylur.mp4

This is something that's been driving me nuts, but my workspace animation is "jiggly" for some reason. When it animates, it kinda shifts the spacing in a weird way.

I copied the workspace part of your dotfiles pretty closely, so I'm not sure what went wrong here.

[Aylur]

mine used to be like that too, but I just got used to it and didn't even notice that it went away
It used to be buttons inside an eventbox, but now its just a button with labels inside, maybe that caused it?

[musjj]

I wonder how Gnome implements this in their shell. From my casual observation, they don't have this problem.

I'm actually noticing that your implementation also "jiggles" when transitioning between the "empty" workspaces. Maybe Gnome is manually animating it with js?

[Aylur]

it jiggles because an empty widget takes up less space than an occupied one
gnome-shell is tightly integrated with with its compositor, which lets them follow workspaces with its animation

[musjj]

Hmmm, I kinda doubt that compositors can manipulate a UI element like this (or if it's even worth doing).

I looked through the gnome-shell's repo and just as I suspected, they're manually animating everything in js without a single css transition in sight. A few relevant places in the codebase:

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/7e5d97c52a80389c694b09d6c25325e4d13f6c00/js/ui/panel.js#L336-387

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/blob/7e5d97c52a80389c694b09d6c25325e4d13f6c00/js/ui/panel.js#L261-333

Might look into this further and see if I can replicate in ags.

[Aylur]

yes, but they are querying the workspace positions through Meta which are the bindings to the compositor, thats how the animation can follow swipe gestures

[musjj]

Oh, not sure about swipe gestures. Haven't used Gnome that much, but I'm mostly just annoyed with the jiggliness/unstableness. So I don't think I'd be needing swipe gestures.